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Abstract
Self-assembling Circuits with Autonomous Fault Handling
Nicholas J. Macias and Lisa J.K. Durbeck
from Proceedings of the 2002 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH-2002)
Copyright© 2002 IEEE
This conference was sponsored by
NASA and DARPA
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This paper reports on the results of our recent NASA SBIR contract,
"Autonomous Self-Repairing Circuits," in which we developed a novel
approach to fault-tolerant circuit synthesis utilizing a self-configurable
hardware platform. The approach was based on the use of atomic components
called Supercells. These Supercells perform several functions in the
building of a desired target circuit: fault detection, fault isolation,
configuration of new Supercells, determination of inter-cell wiring paths,
and implementation of the final target circuit. By placing these tasks
under the control of the Supercells themselves, the resulting system
requires minimal external intervention. In particular, for a given target
circuit, a fixed configuration string can be used to configure the system,
regardless of the location of faults in the underlying hardware. This is
because the configuration string does not directly implement the final
circuit. Rather, it implements a self-organizing system, and that system
then dynamically implements the desired target circuit.
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