[attachment=3584]

CHAPTER 2

BIO-INSPIRED HARDWARE

For a project such as Embryonics, the transition from theory to implementation is far from obvious: for every biological concept we wish to translate into hardware, we must find an equivalent concept in the world on silicon. This section describes our efforts to define a parallel between the cellular structure of biological organisms and the design of computing hardware.
The following subsections will then describe the three-level approach (organism, cell, molecule) we followed in the design of our bio-inspired hardware.

2.1 The Artificial Organism
By demonstrating that it is possible to modify hardware using information, the development of FPGA circuits has proved the feasibility of creating computer hardware inspired by biological ontogeny. To develop an approach to the design of such systems, we analyzed the essential features of biological organisms.