Fault tolerant amplifier system using evolvable hardware

This paper proposes the use evolvable hardware (EHW) for providing fault tolerance to an amplifier system in a signal-conditioning environment. The system has to maintain a given gain despite the presence of faults, without direct human intervention. The hardware setup includes a reconfigurable system on chip device and an external computer where a genetic algorithm is running. For detecting a gain fault, we propose a software-based built-in self-test strategy that establishes the actual values of gain achievable by the system. The performance evaluation of the fault tolerance strategy proposed is made by adopting two different types of fault-models. The fault simulation results show that the technique is robust and that the genetic algorithm finds the target gain with low error.