Defect tolerant sorting networks for WSI implementation

To overcome the yield problem in WSI, it is necessary to include redundancy and use more regular architectures for implementation. The authors present a novel hierarchical fault tolerant sorting network which satisfies both application requirements and area-time complexity constraints. It is very regular in structure and hence more easily reconfigurable than any existing sorting network with the same time complexity. Redundancy is provided at each level of the hierarchy. Hierarchical reconfiguration is implemented by replacing the faulty cells with spare cells at the lowest level first, and go to the next higher level to perform reconfiguration if there is not enough redundancy at the current level. In addition to defect tolerance after fabrication, these redundant cells can also be used for single error correction at run time.<>