Instruction-based development: From evolution to generic structures of digital circuits

Evolutionary techniques provide powerful tools to design novel solutions for hard problems in different areas. However, the problem of scale (i.e. how to create a large, complex solution) represents a significant obstacle for the evolution of complex extensive systems. The computational development represents one of the approaches in the evolutionary design techniques that tries to overcome the problem of scale. In this paper an instruction-based developmental method is presented for the evolutionary design of generic structures of digital circuits. The developmental system involves a set of application-specific instructions constituting programs in order to solve a given task. In particular, the goal is to construct generic structures of combinational circuits. An evolutionary algorithm is utilized for the design of these programs that represent a mapping from the genotypes to the phenotypes during the evolutionary process, i.e. the prescription for the construction of target circuits. Two case-studies are presented in order to demonstrate the successfulness of this approach: (1) the evolutionary design of generic combinational multipliers and (2) the evolutionary design of generic sorting networks.