Abstract-If one considers life on Earth since its very beginning, three levels of organization can be distinguished: the phylogenetic level concerns the temporal evolution of the genetic programs within individuals and species, the ontogenetic level concerns the developmental process of a single multicellular organism, and the epigenetic level concerns the learning processes during an individual organism's lifetime. In analogy to nature, the space of bio-inspired hardware systems can be partitioned along these three axes, phylogeny, ontogeny, and epigenesis, giving rise to the POE model. This paper is an exposition and examination of bio-inspired systems within the POE framework, with our goals being: 1) to present an overview of current-day research, 2) to demonstrate that the POE model can be used to classify bioinspired systems, and 3) to identify possible directions for future research, derived from a POE outlook. We first discuss each of the three axes separately, considering the systems created to date and plotting directions for continued progress along the axis in question. We end our exposition by a discussion of possible research directions, involving the construction of bio-inspired systems that are situated along two, and ultimately all three axes. This could give rise to novel systems endowed with evolutionary, reproductive, regenerative, and learning capabilities.

This paper introduces the ubichip, a custom reconfigurable electronic device capable of implementing bioinspired circuits featuring growth, learning, and evolution. The ubichip is developed in the framework of Perplexus, a European project that aims to develop a scalable hardware platform made of bio-inspired custom reconfigurable devices for simulating large-scale complex systems. In this paper, we describe the configurability and architectural mechanisms that will allow the implementation of evolvable and developmental cellular and neural systems in an efficient way. These mechanisms are dynamic routing, selfreconfiguration, and a neural-friendly logic cell's architecture.

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ÐField-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are large, fast integrated circuitsÐthat can be modified, or configured, almost at any point by the end user. Within the domain of configurable computing, we distinguish between two modes of configurability: staticÐwhere the configurable processor's configuration string is loaded once at the outset, after which it does not change during execution of the task at hand, and dynamicÐwhere the processor's configuration may change at any moment. This paper describes four applications in the domain of configurable computing, considering both static and dynamic systems, including: SPYDER (a reconfigurable processor development system), RENCO (a reconfigurable network computer), Firefly (an evolving machine), and the BioWatch (a self-repairing watch). While static configurability mainly aims at attaining the classical computing goal of improving performance, dynamic configurability might bring about an entirely new breed of hardware devicesÐones that are able to adapt within dynamic environments.

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