Self-Repairing Digital System Based on State Attractor Convergence Inspired by the Recovery Process of a Living Cell

Abstract

Increasing attention is being paid to soft errors due to their high incidence. Although various approaches have been developed to mitigate such soft errors in digital storage components such as latches and flip-flops, most of them can detect only a single soft error and correct it only in limited cases, with a high overhead of hardware resources. In this paper, we propose a new self-repairing digital system based on the state attractor-converging mechanism, inspired by the recovery process of a living cell. To implement the state attractor-converging mechanism, the proposed system introduces additional states other than a working state, such that any abnormal transition to an additional state caused by a soft error can be recovered immediately. Moreover, the proposed system employs a reconfiguration method that enables a system with an erroneous state to be recovered regardless of any working state of the system while having a similar hardware overhead compared with the existing systems. From simulation analysis and experimental verification, we show that the proposed system can detect and correct not only a single soft error without any restriction but also two simultaneous soft errors under a few conditions. Furthermore, the proposed system can recover a soft error occurring in the control hardware used for error detection and correction, which is not possible with any other existing approaches.