Mealy Finite State Machines: an Evolutionary Approach

Synchronous finite state machines are very important for digital sequential designs. Among other important aspects, they represent a powerful way for synchronising hardware components so that these components may cooperate adequately in the fulfillment of the main objective of the hardware design. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary methodology synthesis finite state machines. First, we optimally solve the state assignment NP -complete problem, which is inherent to designing any synchronous finite state machines using genetic algorithms. This is motivated by the fact that with an optimal state assignment one can physically implement the state machine in question using a minimal hardware area and response time. Second, with the optimal state assignment provided, we propose to use the evolutionary methodology to yield optimal evolvable hardware that implements the state machine control component. The evolved hardware requires a minimal hardware area and introduces a minimal propagation delay of the machine output signals.