A distributed control pattern growth method for a fault tolerant cellular architecture

A distributed reconfiguration strategy for cellular array processors is introduced. An array of finite state machine cells controls the processing and switching elements to allow the array to either reconfigure in the presence of faults or to perform different processing functions. The states of the control cells in the array constitute a control pattern, and the process of establishing this control pattern in the array is called pattern growth. When faults in the array are detected, the distributed control mechanism can recreate the correct pattern in a fault-free area of the array, so that a proper operating state is restored. Thus, the technique is not subject to single-point `hard core´ failures, as in the case of a global control mechanism. Unlike other fault-tolerant systems, the proposed method does not assume the existence of components which never fail. Compared to previous research in this area, this method offers both a reduced number of cell interconnections and a smaller local memory for each control cell