Evolutionary Hardware (
EHW) is an engineering field aiming to
design,
optimize or otherwise manipulate electronic hardware with the use of
evolutionary techniques such as
genetic algorithms (
GAs). In other words, it is about
evolving electronic circuits.
The field of EHW has been made practically feasible by reconfigurable electronics, like Programmable Logic Arrays (PLAs) or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Among the uses of EHW are design of circuits outside constraints used in conventional design, fault tolerance or optimization of an already designed circuit with respect to power consumption, area or timing.
For more information on EHW and the ongoing research in this relatively new field, see for example Adrian Thompson's work (homepage http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adrianth/)