Initial Studies of a new VLSI Field Programmable Transistor Array J¨ org Langeheine, Joachim Becker, Simon F¨ olling, Karlheinz Meier, Johannes Schemmel Address of principle author: Heidelberg University, Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics, Schr¨ oderstr. 90, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany, langehei@kip.uni-heidelberg.de WWW home page: http://www.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/vision.html Abstract. A system for intrinsic hardware evolution of analog electronic circuits is presented. It consists of a VLSI chip featuring 16 × 16 pro- grammable transistor cells, an FPGA based PCI card and a software package for setup and control of the experiment. The PCI card serves as a link between the chip and the computer that runs the genetic algo- rithm to produce the configurations for the Field Programmable Tran- sistor Array (FPTA). First measurement results prove chip and system to be working as well as they indicate the tradeoff between performance and configurability. The system is now ready to host a wide variety of evolution experiments. 1 Introduction While digital hardware is becoming more and more powerful, there are a lot of problems requiring analog electronic circuits. Examples are sensors (e.g. [1]), that will always use some analog front end to measure a physical quantity in an analog manner, analog filters or sometimes (massive parallel) signal processing circuits. For the latter example the use of analog circuitry can result in a better ratio of performance and area and/or power consumption (cf. e.g. [2], [3]). Unlike its digital counterpart the domain of analog design is not blessed with powerful tools simplifying the design process. This is, at least to some extent, due to the tight relationship between the used technology, the chosen layout and the performance of the resulting circuit, which makes the simple reuse of standard building blocks without any adaption virtually impossible. Moreover great care has to be taken in how the specific process parameters can be used to achieve the desired behavior because of the device variations on the actual dice. As evolutionary algorithms are assumed to yield good results on complex problems without explicit knowledge of the detailed interdependencies involved, they seem to be a tempting choice. Accordingly the project described in this paper tries to make a step towards the design automation of analog electronics by means of evolvable hardware. From the variety of different approaches intrinsic evolution on a fine grained FPAA, namely a Field Programmable Transistor Array (FPTA) designed in