A self-healing strategy with fault-cell reutilization of bio-inspired hardware

Abstract

The self-healing strategy is a key component in designing the bio-inspired embryonics circuit with the structure of cell arrays. However, the existing self-healing strategies of embryonics circuits mainly focus on permanent faults inside the modules of cells such as the function module and the configuration register, while little attention is paid to transient faults. From the point of view of obtaining high efficiency of hardware utilization, it would be a huge waste of hardware resources by permanent elimination when a cell only suffers a transient fault which can be repaired by a configuration mechanism. A new self-healing strategy, the Fault-Cell Reutilization Self-healing Strategy (FCRSS) which presents a method for reusing transient fault cells, is proposed in this paper. The circuit structures of all the modules in the cells are described in detail. In the new strategy, two processes of elimination and reconfiguration are combined. Within the process of fault-cell elimination, cells with transient faults in the embryonics circuit array could be reused simultaneously to replace the functions of the cells on their left side in the same row. Therefore, transient fault-cells in a transparent state can be reconfigured to realize the fault-cell reutilization. Finally, a circuit simulation, resource consumption, a reliability analysis and a detailed normalization analysis are presented. The FCRSS can improve the hardware utilization rate and system reliability at the expense of a small amount of hardware resources and reconfiguration time. Following the conclusion, the method of determining the optimal self-healing strategy is presented according to the environmental conditions.