A Reconfigurable Self-Healing Embryonic Cell Architecture

The long-term goal of our work described in this paper is the development of a biologically-inspired cellular fault-tolerant hardware system. The basic structure of the system is a multi-cellular embryonic array that is capable of achieving self-diagnostics, self-repair and fault recovery. The ‘nucleolus’ of the cell is a general purpose function unit comprised of a 2-to-1 multiplexer and a Dtype flip-flop. Input and configuration data to the function unit are provided by the DNA segment memory and I/O router. A diagnostic logic monitors the error free operation of the cell. When an error is detected the diagnostic logic requests the reconfiguration unit to kill the cell, transferring its function to a fault-free neighbouring cell. Once permission is granted, the faulty cell is eliminated and becomes transparent. The functionality of each cell will shift in the array until a spare cell is found. Finally the whole embryonic array recovers. Fault-free operation is then continued.