Evolutionary Design of Digital Circuits - an Alternate Approach to the Conventional Logic Design

Conventional design is based on top-down method employed by human designers. This kind of design employs a previous experience and a mysterious process of discovery, which originates in the human mind and is often called intuition or creativity. Unfortunately, this previous experience is in fact a collection of rules, concepts, and principles, which is a strong limiting factor in creativity and invention. Evolutionary design is in fact an Invention Machine that generates new unexpected and usually useful circuits. We discuss in this paper some successful evolutionary designs, and present an original example of evolutionary design of a Finite State Machine (FSM).