Safe intrinsic evolution of Virtex devices

Abstract

The new Virtex device is for many people the solution to the long term problem of implementing random configurations on digital electronic devices as is required in the paradigm of evolvable hardware. It has previously been shown that evolvable hardware was possible on these devices and that it can be accomplished using partial reconfiguration to speed up the configuration process. Unfortunately the circuit did not have any feedback paths, meaning that any time based circuits could not be implemented. This paper attempts to address this problem by using an array of xc6200 like cells within the Virtex device. Two applications are shown to illustrate the effectiveness of these ideas.