An error-detection and self-repairing method for dynamically and partially reconfigurable systems

Reconfigurable systems are gaining an increasing interest in the domain of safety-critical applications, for example in space and avionic applications. In fact, the capability of reconfiguring the system during run-time execution and the high computational power of modern Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) makes these devices suitable for data processing. Moreover, such systems must also guarantee the abilities of self-awareness, self-diagnosis and self-repair in order to cope with errors due to the harsh conditions typically existing in some environments. In this paper we propose a self-repairing method for partially and dynamically reconfigurable systems applied at a fine-grain granularity level. Our method is able to recover and correct errors using the run-time partial reconfiguration capabilities offered by modern SRAM-based FPGAs. Fault injection experiments have been executed on a dynamically reconfigurable system embedding a number of benchmark circuits. Results demonstrate that the method can achieve full detection of single and multiple errors, while significantly improving the system availability with respect to traditional error detection and correction methods.