MOVES: A Modular Framework for Hardware Evolution

In this paper, the authors present a framework that supports experimenting with evolutionary hardware design. They describe the framework's modules for composing evolutionary optimizers and for setting up, controlling, and analyzing experiments. Two case studies demonstrate the usefulness of the framework: evolution of hash functions and evolution based on pre-engineered circuits. In the last years, many authors have presented experiments in which digital hardware has been designed by evolutionary optimization. Perhaps the most popular model for representing a hardware circuit is the Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) model.