In the fall of 2016 I started a research project on evolvable hardware through the Opportunities for Undergraduate Research Experiences program at Missouri S&T. My research advisor for the project was Dr. Mihail Cutitaru, of the Computer Engineering department at Missouri S&T. His expertise in VLSI and FPGA design was crucial to my success in the project.
The paper, titled Computational Evolution of FPGA-based Adaptive Hardware is available for download below. It discusses an attempted implementation of an evolutionary hardware system that can generate mathematically-optimal digital logic circuits based on predetermined evolution criteria. Hardware was implemented using custom evolutionary cells designed in VHDL and run on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA development board, with an integrated microprocessor for oversight of the evolution.