Kening Zhang, Jaafar Alghzao and R.F DeMara
"Organic Embedded Architecture for Sustainable FPGA Soft-Core Processors"
submitted to ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)


An Organic Embedded System (OES) architecture is developed for sustainable performance using SRAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), an Organic Computing (OC) observer/controller organization, and regeneration with Genetic Operators.  Innovations include partial online throughput during regeneration, aging and outlier driven repair assessment, and a uniform design for Autonomic Elements (AEs) despite the fact that they monitor different types of FEs. Using the OES approach; a malfunctioning or faulty AE among the population can be distinguished by its discrepant performance.  The approach is implemented using high-level Hardware Description Language (HDL) which directs a Supervisor Element (SE) to function as a fault management unit through the collection of AE information. Experimental results show that the OES Autonomic Layer demonstrates 100% faulty component isolation for both FEs and AEs with randomly injected single faults.  Using logic circuits from the MCNC-91 benchmark set, throughput during repair phases averaged 75.05%, 82.21%, and 65.21% for the z4ml, cm85a, and cm138a circuits respectively under stated conditions.  In addition to simulation, the proposed OES architecture synthesized from HDL was prototyped on Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA device supporting partial reconfiguration to demonstrate the feasibility of OC approaches for intrinsic regeneration of the selected circuit.