Reconfiguration in Defect-Tolerant Asynchronous Cellular Automata

Defect-tolerance, the ability to overcome unreliability of components in a system, will be essential to realize computers built by nanotechnology, so-called nanocomputers. This paper presents a novel approach to defect-tolerance for nanocomputers that are based on self-timed cellular automata, a type of asynchronous cellular automaton. According to this approach, defective cells are detected and isolated by a wrapping layer. Circuit modules that are used for conducting computation are then placed on the non-defective regions of cell space. We show that communications between modules can be correctly established by introducing a Bus line configuration.