SABRE: a bio-inspired fault-tolerant electronic architecture

Abstract

As electronic devices become increasingly complex, ensuring their reliable, fault-free operation is becoming correspondingly more challenging. It can be observed that, in spite of their complexity, biological systems are highly reliable and fault tolerant. Hence, we are motivated to take inspiration for biological systems in the design of electronic ones. In SABRE (self-healing cellular architectures for biologically inspired highly reliable electronic systems), we have designed a bio-inspired fault-tolerant hierarchical architecture for this purpose. As in biology, the foundation for the whole system is cellular in nature, with each cell able to detect faults in its operation and trigger intra-cellular or extra-cellular repair as required. At the next level in the hierarchy, arrays of cells are configured and controlled as function units in a transport triggered architecture (TTA), which is able to perform partial-dynamic reconfiguration to rectify problems that cannot be solved at the cellular level. Each TTA is, in turn, part of a larger multi-processor system which employs coarser grain reconfiguration to tolerate faults that cause a processor to fail. In this paper, we describe the details of operation of each layer of the SABRE hierarchy, and how these layers interact to provide a high systemic level of fault tolerance.

Different Work Regimes of an Organic Thin Film Transistor OTFT and Possible Applications in Bioelectronics

“…The proposed organic transistor is suitable for the biomimetic applications, which involve carriers mobility under 0.1cm 2 /Vs, [23]. Other applications of the organic electronics in bioelectronics envisage transducer with organic materials as biocompatible interfaces, [24][25][26].…”

The satellite stem cell architecture

“…Bioinspired computing is a large research field and many projects, including Embryonics [4], SABRE [5], eDNA, [6] and eTissue [7], have gained inspiration from multicellular organisms. However, this research aims to extend the multicellular concept beyond the cell-based computation aims of these projects, to a practical satellite avionics architecture.…”

Partial-DNA cyclic memory for bio-inspired electronic cell

“…A radically different approach is the prokaryotic cell [11][12][13] proposed by the researchers at University of the West of England. Based on biological prokaryotic organisms, the prokaryotic cell is distinct from eukaryotic cells, and correlated redundancy was employed in prokaryotic array.…”

“…The total size of prokaryotic memory in chip is increased in a linear way. Inspired by the cyclic memory [16,17], cyclic metamorphic memory [10] and prokaryotic memory [11][12][13], a novel genome memory structure named partial-DNA cyclic memory is presented in this paper. Each cell only stores the expressed genes of itself and several follow-up adjacent cells, and the gene number in cells can be set by users in design process and not limited to the scales of target circuit and embryonics array.…”