Reliability estimation and experimental results of a self-healing asynchronous circuit: A case study

This paper presents a self-healing, asynchronous implementation of a small part of the hardware pre-processing to be used in the video processing unit of GAIA, a scientific mission of the European Space Agency (ESA). The approach uses Self-Healing Cells (SHCs) to achieve a circuit that is able to not only detect permanent faults during runtime but also to recover from them by an autonomous reconfiguration. The design is based on asynchronous Four-State-Logic (FSL), which follows a quasi delay-insensitive approach. The work presents reliability estimations and comparisons to non-fault tolerant FSL as well as first experiences from hardware experiments.