Projects per year
Abstract
Living organisms are complex systems, and yet they
possess extremely high degrees of reliability. Since failures are
local their repair would also be undertaken often on local (cell)
level. Engineers have long sought systems that could offer similar
reliability and have relatively recently started trying to integrate
ideas inspired by nature into the modern silicon technology of
today. While bio-inspired proposals inspired by multi-cellular
systems demonstrated feasibility, the resulting systems were
often unduly complex. We are proposing a radically new
methodology inspired by the characteristics, morphology and
behaviour of simpler prokaryotic bacteria and bacterial
communities. The hypothesis used was that such simple
unicellular organism could help to build simpler cost effective
systems, but with improved reliability than hitherto achieved by
other methods. The result is a cellular array-based fault tolerant
electronic system with online self-test and self-repair capability.
The ideas have been simulated, tested and verified through the
successful construction of demonstrators: a PID and a robot
controller. This paper discusses the underlying biological
principles that guided our research and the bio-inspired model
derived. It also gives a detailed circuit and system description of
the architecture, its run-time self-diagnostic and self-repair
capability demonstrated by examples.
possess extremely high degrees of reliability. Since failures are
local their repair would also be undertaken often on local (cell)
level. Engineers have long sought systems that could offer similar
reliability and have relatively recently started trying to integrate
ideas inspired by nature into the modern silicon technology of
today. While bio-inspired proposals inspired by multi-cellular
systems demonstrated feasibility, the resulting systems were
often unduly complex. We are proposing a radically new
methodology inspired by the characteristics, morphology and
behaviour of simpler prokaryotic bacteria and bacterial
communities. The hypothesis used was that such simple
unicellular organism could help to build simpler cost effective
systems, but with improved reliability than hitherto achieved by
other methods. The result is a cellular array-based fault tolerant
electronic system with online self-test and self-repair capability.
The ideas have been simulated, tested and verified through the
successful construction of demonstrators: a PID and a robot
controller. This paper discusses the underlying biological
principles that guided our research and the bio-inspired model
derived. It also gives a detailed circuit and system description of
the architecture, its run-time self-diagnostic and self-repair
capability demonstrated by examples.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 6376255 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1878-1891 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Oct 2013 |
Projects
- 1 Finished
-
SABRE: Self-healing Cellular Architectures
Tyrrell, A., Liu, J., Qadir, O., Tempesti, G. & Timmis, J.
1/10/08 → 30/09/11
Project: Research project (funded) › Research