A New ASIC Structure With Self-Repair Capability Using Field-Programmable Nanowire Interconnect Architecture

Total ionizing dose tolerance is one of the essential features of the electronic devices used to control and monitor the vital operations in extreme environments. Most of today's commercial off-the-shelf systems do not have this capability unless they are shielded with at least 10 cm of tungsten. Hence, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are developed to achieve the desired performance in extreme environments. In this paper, a new ASIC structure with self-repair capability has been proposed using the field-programmable nanowire interconnect architecture. Our proposed structure includes a nonprogrammable part as circuit functionality and a reconfigurable part to improve the circuit reliability. The performance of the proposed structure is compared with some static and dynamic fault-tolerant approaches. According to the simulation results, the proposed structure can tolerate several permanent faults during the run time with minimum delay, power consumption, and area overhead.