The University of Sussex was joint organiser of the 3rd Int. Conf. on Evolvable Systems (17-19th April 2000, Edinburgh), for which Thompson was programme co-chair. This is the major international forum for evolutionary electronics, and the quality of published papers was a landmark for the field.
We maintain the most comprehensive, up to date, and accurate internet links page for evolutionary electronics [17]; this is now the official page for the Evolutionary Electronics working group of EvoNet (the European network of excellence in evolutionary computing). Sussex have participated in the `EvoElec' committee from its inception.
In 1999, Thompson joined the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computing as an associate editor. He is also an associate editor of the Kluwer Journal of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, and was involved in setting the direction of this new journal. These are the two journals most appropriate for technical evolutionary electronics papers.
A number of research students were involved in the project. Some of this was steered to address the stated objectives of the project, and was summarised above, while other student work was used to expand further:
Ricardo Salem Zebulum, a PhD student from the Catholic University of Rio, performed most of his thesis research in the Sussex laboratory, in collaboration with Thompson. His work on multi-criteria evolutionary methods to evolve low-power operational amplifiers (which have many performance criteria in addition to power usage), directly addressing our project objective [18]. Highlights of his other work with us include the first evolution of circuits at the transistor level in simulation that work as predicted when actually built from real discrete transistors, and some of the first evolutionary experiments using an analogue FPGA chip [19]. The main thrust of the rest of his work was to look at a wide range of electronics design problems and to identify which types of evolutionary techniques could be best tailored to which type of design problem, and to evaluate their efficacy. The design tasks ranged from the high-level design of a CPU, through to evolution at the transistor level of filters and amplifiers [20,21,19,18,22,23,24,25,26].
Paul Layzell's D.Phil. at Sussex was funded by British Telecom to work closely with Thompson, under the supervision of Husbands. Together, Layzell and Thompson realised the necessity for novel analysis techniques, and how they could be applied. Layzell went on to use this to discover the phenomenon of `Population Fault Tolerance' [27,5]. This work became incorporated into the objectives of our project, and was summarised above. Layzell's further contribution was to develop an `Evolvable Motherboard' as a test-bed for evolutionary electronics research. This circuit-board provides a matrix of reconfigurable analogue switches into which any components can be plugged, such as transistors, operational amplifiers, or logic gates. The resulting evolvable circuit is much more flexible, controllable, and observable than the current alternatives, which consist of fixed sets of components and reconfigurable connections integrated onto one chip. This is helpful for a wide range of studies, such as a comparison of the effect of circuit noise on evolutionary dynamics in various different scenarios [28,29,30].
MSc. students Ian Ozsvald and Sam Woolf evolved circuits using the Zetex `Totally Reconfigurable Analog Circuit' chip: firstly for engineering applications [31], and secondly for artistic ends [32,10].