Self-healing Cellular Architectures for Biologically-inspired Highly Reliable Electronic Systems

Lead Research Organisation: University of the West of England
Department Name: Faculty of Environment and Technology

Abstract

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Description Imagine a computer, communication or satellite equipment or, indeed, many items of electronic equipment that today might typically contain silicon chips with a billion transistors or more, the structures and behaviour of which are inspired by prokaryotic cells such as those found in bacteria and in bacterial communities. Imagine these systems growing into arrays for functional units that can transfer their characteristics through their 'DNA' to assist both in their computation and preventing them from breaking down. Imagine a massive array of these prokaryotic-type cells forming a computational tissue which is capable of realising any functionality of any electronic system that you desire. Imagine such a unique tissue implemented on a silicon chip. Imagine the resulting electronic system, made up of such components, where resilience against becoming faulty is a natural consequence of the design, an emergent property. Imagine a system that performs automatic self-diagnostic and self-repair in the presence of faults, so that all systems around us could carry on working without error in the face of multiple internal faults and, consequently, hardly ever breaking down. These imaginings became reality as a result of our research work realised.
We applied characteristics, processes, mechanisms and structures found in unicellular creatures to construct fault tolerant electronic systems that use a reconfigurable cellular array architecture. We used the hypothesis that simpler creatures in nature, in particular prokaryotes such as bacteria, would be inspirational in building simpler cost effective systems, but with improved reliability than hitherto achieved. Structure and behaviour of the bacteria and bacterial communities were applied to the two dimensional world of silicon integrated circuits. These characteristics included; the double helix nature of the DNA, the supercoiling compression of the genetic material, and horizontal gene transfer. The result is a cellular array based fault tolerant electronic system, called Unitronics (after Unicellular Electronics), with online self-test and self-repair capability that can conduct repair 'on-the-fly'. This is a system where the cells are programmable 'universal' elements capable to implement combinational and sequential functions so that collectively they can describe the expected overall behaviour of any target system.
Unitronics offers in-built ('invisible') online self-diagnostic and self-repair to a system designer and the capability to repair multiple and simultaneously occurring faults that an electronic system may be subjected to. The detection and recovery mechanisms are "inherent" to the system, that is, specific redundancy for specific functions are not required at design time, the system designer can spend almost all of the time focusing on the normal operation of the system, not on all the myriad effects on function that component failure can bring, because this is all taken care of in the lower levels, in a largely 'invisible' manner.
Our revolutionary concepts were thoroughly simulated, tested and verified through the successful construction of demonstrators: a PD negative feedback controller for a humanoid-robot elbow joint motor, and a mobile robot obstacle avoidance controller.
Exploitation Route In the coming years, we hope to take our research further towards manufacturability. We plan that, via a pan-European EU supported collaborative research programme based on this project, we will be in the position to lay the foundations for a turn-key solution, including EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tool support, to the engineering community as a fully European sourced product. We have two submissions for funding already in process for this, one that would be supported by the EU "FET open" programme and one by the European Space Agency.
Sectors Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Electronics,Healthcare,Transport
URL http://www.brl.ac.uk/researchthemes/self-repairingroboticsystems/sabreproject.aspx
 
Description In the coming years, we hope to take our research further towards manufacturability. We plan that, via a pan-European EU supported collaborative research programme based on this project, we will be in the position to lay the foundations for a turn-key solution, including EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tool support, to the engineering community as a fully European sourced product. We have two submissions for funding already in process for this, one that would be supported by the EU "FET open" programme and one by the European Space Agency.
First Year Of Impact 2013