A customizable FPGA IP core implementation of a general purpose Genetic Algorithm engine

Hardware implementation of genetic algorithms (GA) is gaining importance as genetic algorithms can be effectively used as an optimization engine for real-time applications (for e.g., evolvable hardware). In this work, we report the design of an IP core that implements a general purpose GA engine which has been successfully synthesized and verified on a Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA device (XC2VP30). The placed and routed IP core has an area utilization of only 16% and clock period of 2.2n s (~450 MHz). The GA core can be customized in terms of the population size, number of generations, cross-over and mutation rates, and the random number generator seed. The GA engine can be tailored to a given application by interfacing with the application specific fitness evaluation module as well as the required storage memory (to store the current and new populations). The core is soft in nature i.e., a gate-level netlist is provided which can be readily integrated with the user's system.