From here to there: Future robust EHW technologies for large digital designs

Fault-tolerance may be expected to gain more and more importance in the future. Extremely harsh and changing environments, like outer space, already force us to think about this issue today, but issues like production of large-scale devices might put the same requirements on the devices of tomorrow. Imagine a mixture of chemical substances in a reservoir, together with a circuit-implementing shell that has self-repairing properties based on the maintainance of the chemical equilibrium. Could this type of solution be the basis for a robust future technology for evolvable hardware? A long term goal of evolvable hardware is to evolve large complex designs for large devices. However both evolving large complex designs and manufacturing large reliable devices is technologically out of reach due to the resource greedy nature of GAs and low device yield rates. In this article we explore the technological requirements of digital design, design by evolution and development and the reliability issue in the light of today's digital evolvable hardware technology, FPGA and a proposed fault tolerant technology, Amorphous Computers. Considering the limitations of these platforms, we project these findings towards possible future technology platforms.