Evolutionary recovery from radiation induced faults on reconfigurable devices

Radiation hard technologies for electronics are the conventional approach for survivability in high radiation environments. This paper presents a novel approach based on evolvable hardware. The key idea is to reconfigure a programmable device, in-situ, to compensate, or bypass its degraded or damaged components. The paper demonstrates the approach using a JPL-developed reconfigurable device, a field programmable transistor array (FPTA), which shows recovery from radiation damage when reconfigured under the control of evolutionary algorithms. Experiments with total radiation dose up to 350 kRad show that while the functionality of a variety of circuits, including a rectifier and a digital to analog converter implemented on an FPTA-2 chip is degraded/lost at levels before 100 kRad, the correct functionality can be recovered through the proposed evolutionary approach. The evolutionary algorithm controls the state of about 1,500 switches that determine configurations on the FTPA-2 programmable device. Evolution is able to use the resources of the reconfigurable cells, even radiation damaged components, to synthesize a new solution.