Bio-inspired self-test for evolvable fault tolerant hardware systems

Abstract

This paper presents a novel bio-inspired self-test technique for the implementation of evolvable fault tolerant systems based on the structure, behavior and processes observed in prokaryote unicellular organisms. Such Unitronic (unicellular electronic) artificial systems are implemented by FPGA-like bio-inspired cellular arrays and made up of structurally identical cells. All cells possess self-diagnostic and self-healing capability. Our underlying conceptual postulation is: if it can be guaranteed that during the test phase a cell, the internal functionality of which is configured with a complementary input sequence, demonstrates the same functionality, as that with the original sequence during its normal mode of operation, then the cell is fault free, otherwise it is faulty. Our proposed self-test can evaluate all stuck-at-zero and stuck-at-one faults of the system if at any time only one fault exists. Hardware redundancy is optimised because the same hardware, by simple reconfiguration is able to test itself and thus eliminates the need of duplicated, triplicated hardware.