Evolutionary Design of Generic Combinational Multipliers Using Development

Combinational multipliers represent a class of circuits that is usually considered to be hard to design by means of the evolutionary techniques. However, experiments conducted under the previous research demonstrated (1) a suitability of an instruction-based developmental model to design generic multiplier structures using a parametric approach, (2) a possibility of the development of irregular structures by introducing an environment which is considered as an external control of the developmental process – inspired by the structures of conventional multipliers and (3) an adaptation of the developing structures to the different environments by utilizing the properties of the building blocks. These experiments have represented the first case when generic multipliers were designed using an evolutionary algorithm combined with the development. The goal of this paper is to present an improved developmental model working with the simplified building blocks based on the concept of conventional generic multipliers, in particular, adders and basic AND gates. We show that this approach allows us to design generic multiplier structures which exhibit better delay in comparison with the classic multipliers, where adder represents a basic component.