A Cost-Effective Self-Healing Approach for Reliable Hardware Systems
In this paper, self-healing concept for hardware systems is investigated and a new approach is proposed. Hardware systems have been proposing imitations to biological organisms in the way they offer healing and recovery abilities. Digital systems with inspired homogeneous architecture have improved capabilities to compensate for any faults. Self-healing is defined by the ability of a system to detect faults or failures and fix them. One of the main problems in current self-healing approaches is area overhead and scalability for complex structures considering they are based on redundancy and spare blocks. This paper proposes a different approach for self-healing based on embryonic structures without a need for spare cells. The area overhead is lower compared to other approaches relying on spare cells. The proposed approach relies on time multiplexing two functions in one cell within one clock cycle. The reliability of the proposed technique is studied and compared to conventional system with different failure rates. This approach is capable of healing up to 50% of the cells where each cell can cover another neighbor failed cell at most. The area overhead is 9% for the proposed approach which is much lower compared to other approaches using spare cell. The proposed approach is applied to investigate two case studies; ALU array, and neural network.