A novel approach towards less area overhead self-healing hardware systems
Self-healing digital systems has been a key approach towards reliable systems. It has been challenging for researchers to find an optimal scalable solution for it. Self-healing is based on redundancy by adding spare cells to replace faulty cells when needed for recovery which makes an area overhead. One of main problem in current self-healing approaches is area overhead because they are based on redundancy (spare blocks). This paper presents an idea for self-healing without using redundancy through embryonic hardware where each cell is a universal cell. Therefore, the area overhead will be lower compared to previous works. The idea is based on using every active block as a spare cell for its neighbor through time multiplexing. In case of faulty cell, the neighbor cell will run its task as well as the task of the faulty cell successively in one clock cycle. The area overhead of the proposed technique is shown to be much lower than compared other approaches relying on spare cells. The proposed solution provides 50% chance of repairing.