Engineering Commons^™

Biology Goes Digital: An Array Of 5,700 Spartan Fpgas Brings The Biowall To "Life", Christof Teuscher, Gianluca Tempesti

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A unique, scientific research instrument and art piece, the BioWall models bio-inspired electronic tissues capable of evolution, selfrepair, self-replication – and learning. Much pure and applied scientific research has focused on replicating biological functions in digital hardware. Here, at the Logic Systems Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), we have utilized 5,700 Xilinx Spartan™ FPGAs, in multiple configurations, to build bio-inspired computing machines that exploit three essential biological models: • Phylogenesis – the history of the evolution of the species • Ontogenesis – the development of an individual as directed by his genetic code • …