Hardware reconfiguration scheme for high availability systems

Abstract

We propose a hardware reconfiguration scheme that, together with the adoption of an on-line testing strategy, can be employed to meet the goal of designing highly available systems to be implemented by means of very deep sub-micron technology. Compared to alternate software reconfiguration schemes frequently employed for high reliability systems, that proposed here allows to minimize the reconfiguration impact on system's performance, thus being suitable to applications with strong constraints in terms of performance and availability. Our scheme features self-checking ability with respect to its possible internal faults, thus guaranteeing that no erroneous reconfiguration can occur, because of faults affecting the reconfiguration hardware itself.

Preliminary design of future reconfigurable IMA platforms

“…The reconfiguration objectives in the context of the SCAR-LETT project aims at enhancing the operational reliability of the aircraft, this is somehow a different goal from reconfigurable avionic systems we found in the literature [7,5,8,4,3] where reconfiguration is one mean to achieve fault tolerance as stated in [7]: "reconfiguration is one fault tolerance mechanisation for providing expected functionality after a fault".…”

“…However, even if our primary objectives are different, the methodology, the software and/or hardware architecture design [7,4,5], are insightful for our goals:…”

New Challenges for Future Avionic Architectures

“…This is a different goal from the reconfigurable avionic systems proposed in the literature [15,11,16,9,3] where reconfiguration is one means to achieving fault tolerance. Similarly, the classic FDIR (Failure Detection Isolation and Recovery) procedure used in most space systems uses dynamic reconfiguration during the recovery phase.…”

“…However, even if our primary objectives are different, the methodology, the software and/or hardware architecture design [15,9,11] are helping us toward our goals:…”