Initial Studies of a New VLSI Field Programmable Transistor Array

A system for intrinsic hardware evolution of analog electronic circuits is presented. It consists of a VLSI chip featuring 16 × 16 programmable transistor cells, an FPGA based PCI card and a software package for setup and control of the experiment. The PCI card serves as a link between the chip and the computer that runs the genetic algorithm to produce the configurations for the Field Programmable Transistor Array (FPTA). First measurement results prove chip and system to be working as well as they indicate the tradeoff between performance and configurability. The system is now ready to host a wide variety of evolution experiments.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ICES
• Authors: Jörg Langeheine, Joachim Becker, Simon Fölling, Karlheinz Meier, Johannes Schemmel
• Keywords: Chip, Hardware, ICES 2001, PCI Card, Programmable Transistor