Automatic Fault Handling on Coarse Grain Reconfigurable Computing Architecture

Conventional circuit design exploits device characteristics with a certain temperature/radiation range. Beyond this condition, the circuit may be damaged. For Evolvable Hardware (EHW), although one or more elements may be damaged, its function can be recovered by utilizing residual resource. In EHW, an additional DSP (digital signal processor) is usually used as a controller, which runs some algorithms for a long time to find a way to handle fault. This paper describes a new evolvable coarse grain re-configurable platform currently under development. This platform differs significantly from previous efforts, in that it has a coarse-grained, signal-flow architecture oriented towards implementing multi-media and stream-media. If some fault occurs, it can quickly find out which element is in error and automatically running recovery program to come back to its previous function.