ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the field of reconfigurable chips and modern applications of these devices. We present two classes of reconfigurable devices, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAAs). Modern applications of these devices involve the evolutionary design of electronic circuits and Virtual Computing. Recently GAs have been employed as an agent that programs a reconfigurable chip in order to carry out automatic circuit design. Promising results have been attained, which contributed to increase the interest in this area of research, commonly called Evolvable Hardware (EHW). On the other hand, the idea of Virtual Computing is based on the use of highly reconfigurable and adaptive computer systems, realized through FPGAs. The main challenge in this area is merging Evolvable Hardware and Virtual Computing.
