Self-healing strategy for transient fault cell reutilization of embryonic array circuit

Self-healing strategy is a key element in designing the embryonic array circuit. However, all existing strategies of embryonics circuit mainly aim at the permanent faults in cell, and lack of research about transient faults. It would be a huge waste of hardware resource if a cell was permanently eliminated due to a minor local transient fault, and the waste will result in seriously low hardware utilization in the sky environment dominated by transient faults that can repaired by reconfiguration mechanism. In this paper, a new self-healing strategy named fault cell reutilization self-healing strategy (FCRSS), which can reuse the transient fault cell, was proposed. In the new strategy, cell elimination and reconfiguration are bound together. In the period of cell elimination process, cells in transparent state due to transient failure can be reconfigured to achieve reutilization. Methods to design of all the modules are described in detail. Circuit simulation and reliability analysis results prove that the FCRSS can increase hardware availability rate and system reliability at the expense of a small amount of hardware and few of reconfiguration time.