Dependable Controller Design Using Polymorphic Counters

This paper proposes utilisation of polymorphic electronics to design dependable digital circuit controllers. The controller of a general digital circuit is an implementation of a finite state machine. One of most popular implementation is based on a synchronous digital counter. The counter consists of flip-flops and some glue logic. In proposed approach, the glue logic is designed using polymorphic gates. Polymorphic gates exhibit two or more logic functions in according to a specific condition (e.g. Vdd level or special signals). This allows to make a smart reconfiguration of the circuit designed using polymorphic gates. The controller based on this approach can be then reconfigured very easily and by this, it can respond to (potentially inconvenient) environment circumstances.