eTissue: An Adaptive Reconfigurable Bio-Inspired Hardware Architecture

In the field of fault tolerance, adaptive bio-inspired hardware is springing up in recent years. The robustness of human blood system is derived from substitution among homogeneous cells mechanism, differentiation of adult stem cells mechanism, and conversion between heterogeneous cells mechanism. Illumined by the mechanisms mentioned above, this paper presents a bio-inspired adaptive reconfigurable hardware architecture named electronic tissue (eTissue). Different from existing multicellular array, eTissue recognizes and processes data based on data tag, which loosely couples operations and processing elements, consequently equips eTissue with flexible cell replacement capability. We implement substitution among homogeneous cells, differentiation of adult stem cells, and conversion between heterogeneous cells based on this flexible cell replacement capability. These mechanisms compose the hierarchical self-healing of eTissue, and the self-evolution of eTissue is derived from differentiation of adult stem cells and conversion between heterogeneous cells. We implement the eTissue prototype system in FPGA, and conduct fault-injection experiments to attest to its self-healing and self-evolution capability. Finally, we analyze and discuss the robustness of eTissue.