Bio - Inspired & Traditional Approaches to Obtain Fault Tolerance

Applying some observable phenomena from cells, focused on their organization, function, control and healing mechanisms, simple fault tolerant algorithms can be obtained. This kind of bio-inspired solutions allows designers to improve error correction and fault tolerant mechanism on hardware implementation. Traditionally, fault tolerance has been added explicitly to a system by including redundant hardware and/or software, which will take over when an error has been detected. These concepts and ideas have been applied before with the Triple Modular Redundancy. Our approach is to design systems where redundancy was incorporated implicitly into the hardware and to mix bio-inspired and traditional approaches to deal with fault tolerance. These ideas are shown using a Discrete Cosine Transform (application) as organ, its MAC (function) interconnected as cell and parity redundancy checker (error detector) as immune system to obtain a fault tolerance design. This bio-inspired solution will be validated using a reconfigurable platform based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).