abstract = "Integrated circuits and electronic systems fabricated
in current technologies suffer from a wide range of
faults that may occur during the fabrication process or
during the life time of each circuit/device. Soft
(non-persistent) faults are caused mainly by ionizing
radiation. It is known that the rate of soft faults
increases and the rate of hard faults decreases as
technology improves. It is therefore vital to build
systems able to tolerate faults, especially in order to
improve the reliability of critical applications, such
as systems working in extreme environments, satellites,
aircrafts, medical instruments etc. Self-healing and
fault-tolerant systems deal with faults through
mitigation, self-test and self-repair mechanisms. A
number of designs have already been proposed to improve
reliability. The bio-inspired approach to self-healing
systems is part of a very promising class of methods
that try to mimic the successful reliability solutions
found in living organisms to design self-healing
electronic systems. This project aims to further our
understanding of how the unicellular nature of
biological systems and their protective immune systems
could be used to enhance reliability of digital
electronic systems. A novel model, which takes
inspiration from unicellular living entities
(prokaryotes) to reduce the large hardware and software
overhead found in current bio-inspired multi-cellular
systems, is proposed and implemented in an architecture
named Unitronics (Unicellular + Electronics).
Unitronics proposes the application of mechanisms that
take place during bacterial biofilms formation to
improve the reliability of electronic systems. Concepts
characteristic to bacterial formation, such as geometry
of islands, void and cell, are used to define the
prototype of Unitronics-based applications in the
hardware layer. Each cell includes configuration
information that defines the cell's phenotype once it
has been programmed. Finally, other prokaryotic
features such as bacterial species, transposone,
horizontal and vertical gene transfer functions
(HGT-VGT) define the genotype of Unitronics systems,
and are used to evolve, test and repair cells within a
community. A single cell is not able to repair itself;
instead the cell includes just its own configuration
bits. A faulty cell is repaired based on its
similarities and differences to/from other cells within
a community of cells. This method has several
advantages, such as: balance between time and hardware
redundancies; possibility of repairing several faulty
cells at the same time; and compression of redundant
information needed for fault recovery. Several
applications (including an e-puck object avoidance
robot controller, signed and unsigned multipliers, and
PID controller) are used to demonstrate the underlying
theory and the practical viability of our bio-inspired
model, and to show examples of performances that can be
achieved using the Unitronics architecture we have
proposed",
notes = "Is this GP?
March 2017 Full text not available from this
repository",