¹College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 211106, China.
²College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China

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Abstract—Embryonic hardware is a kind of digital circuit structure which has the innative characteristics of distributed autonomous control and self-repairing. Configuration memory is the important module in cell circuit to determine function and interconnection of cells, it remains reliable is the precondition for the cell array to work normally. At present, the self-repairing and structural simplification of configuration memory are key research directions. Many structures and design strategies have been put forward for circuit simplification, but few methods for hardware self-repairing, while which should be more important. New techniques should combine the abilities of self-repairing and simplification need to be continuously explored. Currently known self-repairing strategies only ensure the configuration memory store the configuration data, but not ensure the reliability of the registers in which the configuration data are stored. In this paper, a dual-backup configuration memory structure based on shift registers is proposed. Each cell saves the configuration data of the left adjacent cell and the configuration data of the current cell as backups. The function of a fault-cell can be replaced by its right cell. Each cell only needs to save three pieces of configuration data to ensure that the configuration memory can be repaired in a variety of faults. The circuit structure and self-repairing strategy of configuration memory are given, and the self-repairing ability is simulated and verified.

Index Terms—Embryonic hardware, configuration memory, self-repairing strategy, dual-backup structure.

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Cite: Zhang Zhai, Qiu Yao, Liu Yan, Yuan Xiaoliang, Yao Rui, "A Dual-Backup Configuration Memory of Embryonic Self-Repairing Hardware," Journal of Computers vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 359-365, 2019.