Development of self-repairing digital systems based on the recovery mechanism inspired from robust characteristics of a living cell

Abstract

Increasing attention is being paid to soft errors due to their high incidence. Although various approaches have been developed to mitigate such soft errors in digital storage components, most of them can only detect a single soft error and only correct it in limited cases, with a high overhead of hardware resources. We propose a new self-repairing digital system inspired by the recovery process of a living cell. The proposed system introduces additional states other than a working state, such that any abnormal transition to an additional state caused by a soft error can be recovered immediately. Moreover, the proposed system employs a reconfiguration method which enables a system with an erroneous state to be recovered regardless of any working state of the system with a low hardware overhead. Furthermore, the proposed system can recover a soft error occurring in the control hardware used for error detection and correction, which is not possible with any other existing approaches. Based on simulation and experimental analysis in comparison with the existing methods, we have verified that the proposed self-repairing system can ensure higher reliability with a low hardware overhead.