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The field of bio-inspired hardware and evolvable systems poses unique challenges in the research of theories, algorithms, software, and hardware. One of the major common challenges is to translate, effectively and efficiently, mechanisms from biology into hardware. It is not just about how to implement smart algorithms in hardware, but more about how to make hardware itself smarter by making it adapt its structure and functionality autonomously in dynamic and uncertain environments. This vision of making hardware ‘truly adaptive’ is a huge challenge because silicon hardware is only changeable through built-in reconfiguration options. For example, capturing the full complexity of an organism in a faithful-to-biology model to build a fault tolerant system will inevitably result in prohibitive area overhead and reduced performance. This requires solutions that are simplified to a degree – where overhead and performance are acceptable – but which still exhibit the desired features of the biological inspiration.
Today's systems are opening up great opportunities for bio-inspired approaches since, in modern technologies, area and raw clock speed are no longer the main concerns in terms of overheads and performance. New concerns are variability,...