A Novel Hardware Architecture for Self-adaptive Systems

This article focuses at studying the implementation of the self-configuration concept on a novel unconventional hardware architecture. This proposed programmable architecture implements self-placement and self-routing which, due to its intrinsic design, enable the development of systems with self-configuration, self-repair and/or fault tolerance capabilities [1],[2]. For scalability issues, the architecture has been defined as a regular array of homogeneous elements. It is able to analyze and modify its own circuits. This means that the functionality can be modified and improved over time, leading to more versatile designs. The system can check for faulty cells or regions and simply work around them. Those cells can be marked as bad regions so the system can keep working. This permits to deal with imperfectly-manufactured cell arrays, which is a key issue in the extremely complex systems envisioned for the future micro and nano technologies.