Method to self-repairing reconfiguration strategy selection of embryonic cellular array on reliability analysis

Abstract

Bio-inspired engineering system has the characteristics of self-diagnosis and self-repairing. Embryonics, new field programmable multi-celluar array hardware, is inspired by the Ontogeny of organism, contains the ability of fault tolerance with cell redundancy and corresponding reconfiguration mechanisms. Row/column elimination and cell elimination are the two self-repairing reconfiguration strategies mostly adopted. How to determine the one used in design from the perspective of reliability evaluation is the innovative method in Embryonics research. In this paper, two models named ideal reliability model and practical reliability model are proposed to analyze the reliability influences of the self-repairing reconfiguration strategies. The former model is abstracted just from the architecture and repair principles of embryonic cellular array without considering the implementation details in cell, while the assistant hardware of extra register and routing channels in switch box are extracted into the practical model. The selection principle of the self-repairing reconfiguration strategy is summarized on reliability analysis. Following the approach, designers can find out the more reliable strategy according to the chip size and design goal before the circuit implementation.