Built-in self-repair structure for real-time fault recovery applications

摘要

Recent developments in high-tech industries have led to integrated circuits that are used increasingly in most of the critical applications such as medical supervisory systems and space applications. These systems are facing two major challenges, namely reliability and timing requirements. In other words, these systems have to operate correctly while meeting timing requirements even in the presence of several faults; therefore, they must be protected by real-time fault tolerance techniques to deal with both mentioned challenges. However, most of the existing approaches consider only one of these factors. In this paper, we have proposed a new reconfigurable application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) structure with real-time fault-tolerance capability which repairs itself in two steps with a minimum delay. It includes some reconfigurable basic cells with self-repair capability which are used to implement the first recovery step. In the second step, the fault recovery process is done by replacing the faulty basic cell using a new reconfigurable routing network. According to the simulation results, our proposed structure can tolerate several permanent faults with minimum delay, power consumption, and area overhead.