Pascal Nussbaum

Embryonics: a new family of coarse-grained field-programmable gate array with self-repair and self-reproducing properties

The growth and the operation of all living beings are directed through the interpretation, in each of their cells, of a chemical program, the DNA. This program, called genome, is the blueprint of the organism and consists of a sequence of four discrete characters: A, C, G, and T. This process is the source of inspiration for the Embryonics (embryological electronics) project, whose final objective is the conception of very large scale integrated circuits endowed with properties usually associated with the living world: self-repair (cicatrization) and self-reproduction. Within this framework, we will present a new family of coarse-grained field-programmable gate arrays. Each cell is a binary decision machine whose microprogram represents the genome, and each part of the microprogram is a gene whose execution depends on the physical position of the cell in the array, i.e. on its coordinates. The considerable redundancy introduced by the presence of a genome in each cell has significant advantages: self-reproduction (the automatic production of one or more copies of the original organism) and self-repair (the automatic repair of one or more faulty cells) become relatively simple operations. Even if the described system seems exceedingly complex, we believe that computer architectures inspired by molecular biology will allow the development of new FPGAs endowed with quasi-biological properties extremely useful in environments where human intervention is necessarily limited (nuclear plants, space applications, etc.).

Embryonics: The Birth of Synthetic Life

A novel architecture descending from the work of von Neumann, has been developed. This architecture borrows its main principles from living systems. Like living beings, the organisms considered here are able to autonomously develop, maintain their functionality and reproduce. These genomic architectures are developed on reprogrammable hardware. They are not restricted to a given class of functions but accept any combinational and sequential function to be downloaded. These architectures are fault tolerant by design, so they can adapt to failures affecting the silicon. They autonomously evolve so as to maintain their functionality and hence self-reconfigure when needed.

Functional Organisms Growing on Silicon

This paper describes a novel architecture inspired from the multicellular organizations found in Nature. This architecture is tailored to let functional organisms (logical functions) grow on silicon. To this aim, the silicon surface is populated with an array of identical programmable cells, which may be configured by a bitstream. By analogy with the biological world, the concatenation of the bitstreams used to program the cells composing a given function is called the “genome” of that function. In addition to conventional BIST (Built-in Self-Test) structures addressing signal line faults, this new version tolerates failures affecting power supply. It also allows the growth of differentiated organisms on the same surface by including a code in the genome to distinguish them. As a testbed, we have developped an integrated circuit prototype, code name GenomIC. It contains only a single 4-cell structure, but prefigures which kind of structure can be massively integrated in very large circuits in order to manage complexity (multicellular organization), evolvability (genetic data manipulation) as well as fault tolerance.

Speeding-up Digital Ecologies Evolution Using a Hardware Emulator: Preliminary Results

Reference EPFL-ARTICLE-28557View record in Web of Science Record created on 2004-11-30, modified on 2016-08-08