An Improved Reconfiguration Method for Degradable Processor Arrays Using Genetic Algorithm

This paper addresses the NP-complete problem of reconfiguring two-dimensional degradable processor arrays under the row and column rerouting constraint. One promising approach to this problem is to treat the reconfiguration problem as a combinatorial optimization problem of finding the set of rerouting rules for all rows/columns and employ a genetic algorithm (GA) to obtain an optimal solution (Fukushi et al., 2005 ). However, major drawback of this method is poor utilization of processing elements (PEs) in the reconfiguration process. In this paper, the previous method (Fukushi et al., 2005) for efficient reconfiguration was improved. The key idea is to treat the reconfiguration problem as an optimization problem of determining routing directions for all faulty PEs. A new rerouting scheme is also proposed to reroute logical rows/columns efficiently. Experimental study shows that the proposed method produces good results in terms of the percentage of harvest and degradation