EMBRYONICS - A NEW METHODOLOGY FOR DESIGNING FIELD-PROGRAMMABLE GATE ARRAYS WITH SELF-REPAIR AND SELF-REPLICATING PROPERTIES

The growth and the operation of all living beings are directed through the interpretation, in each of their cells, of a chemical program, th e DNA string or genome, This process is the source of inspiration for the Embryonics (embryonic 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 (cic atrization) and self-replication. Ne will begin by showing that any lo gic system can be represented by an ordered binary decision diagram (O BDD), and then embedded into a fine-grained field-programmable gate ar ray (FPGA) whose basic cell is a multiplexer with programmable connect ions. The cellular array thus obtained is perfectly homogeneous: the f unction of each cell is defined by a configuration (or gene) and all t he genes in the array, each associated with a pair of coordinates, mak e up the blueprint (or genome) of the artificial organism. In the seco nd part of the project, we add to the basic cell a memory and an inter preter to, respectively, store and decode the complete genome. The int erpreter extracts from the genome the gene of a particular cell as a f unction of its position in the array (its coordinates) and thus determ ines the exact configuration of the relative multiplexer, The consider able redundancy introduced by the presence of a genome in each cell ha s significant advantages: self-replication (the automatic production o f one or more copies of the original organism) and self-repair (the au tomatic repair of one or more faulty cells) become relatively simple o perations. The multiplexer-based FPGA cell and the interpreter are fin ally embedded into an electronic module; an array of such modules make it possible to demonstrate self-repair and self-replication.