A reconfigurable analog neural network for Evolvable Hardware applications: Intrinsic evolution and extrinsic verification

Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks (CTRNN) have been proposed for use as reconfigurable hardware for Evolvable Hardware (EH) applications. Our previous work demonstrated a fully programmable hardware CTRNN using off-the-shelf components and provided verification of its utility in extrinsic EH. However, applicability for intrinsic usage was not studied. This work addresses that unanswered issue and demonstrates that configurations evolved in the hardware are behaviorally equivalent to simplified state equation models. Further, this work also provides strong similarity metrics to compare the hardware's performance with software simulated CTRNN models.