Evolvable hardware (EHW) based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) opens up new possibilities towards building efficient adaptive system. State of the art EHW systems based on virtual reconfiguration and dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) both have their limitations. The former has a huge area overhead and circuit delay, and the later has slow configuration speed and low flexibility. Therefore a general low-cost fast hybrid reconfiguration architecture is proposed in this paper, which merges the high flexibility of virtual reconfiguration and the low resource cost of DPR. Moreover, the bitstream relocation technology is introduced to save the bitstream storage space, and the discrepancy configuration technology is adopted to reduce reconfiguration time. And an embedded RAM core is adopted to store bitstreams which accelerate the reconfiguration speed further. The proposed architecture is evaluated by the online evolution of digital image filter implemented on the Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA development board ML605. And the experimental results show that our system has lower resource overhead, higher operating frequency, faster reconfiguration speed and less bitstream storage space in comparison with the previous works.

This paper presents an evolutionary technique to build and maintain fault-recoverable digital circuits. As the synthesis of a circuit by genetic algorithm is progressed according to the circuit behavioral objectives and interactions with the environments, the knowledge regarding the architecture as well as the placement and routing processes is not the major concern of the proposed method. The evolutionary behavior of the circuit also prevents the circuit from stuck-at faults by continuously modifying the neighboring circuit blocks accordingly. This is done without the prior knowledge of where and how the faults occur because of the evolutionary nature. Thus, the overhead circuit blocks for fault diagnosis and redundancy are minimized with this design. The fault-recoverable evolvable hardware circuits are synthesized to build a few combinational logics by evolution and the fault recovery capabilities are shown with the reconfigurable FPGA.