Trading defect tolerance for chip area in nanotecnology implementations of systolic arrays

摘要

New self-assembling techniques used to build nano-scale architecture prototypes have a drawback of being prone to defects and transient faults. Fault and defect tolerance techniques will be crucial to the use of nano-electronics in the future. However, these techniques usually introduce a significant hardware overhead. In these paper we are proposing a method for trading an architecture tolerance on fabrication defects for chip area. The method will be presented using an architecture with generic topology and illustrated on the example of partially defect tolerant bit-plane semi-systolic array. In order to illustrate the method the results of FPGA implementation of completely fault tolerant bit-plane array, and partially fault tolerant bit-plane array will be given.