In this work, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) reconfigurability is exploited to realize autonomous fault recovery in mission-critical applications at runtime. The proposed Netlist Driven Evolutionary Refurbishment (NDER) technique utilizes designtime information from the circuit netlist to constrain the search space of the algorithm by up to 98.1% in terms of the chromosome length representing reconfigurable logic elements. This facilitates refurbishment of relatively large-sized FPGA circuits as compared to previous works. Hence, the scalability issue associated with Evolvable Hardware based refurbishment is addressed and improved. Experiments are conducted with multiple circuits from the MCNC benchmark suite to validate the approach and assess its benefits and limitations. Successful refurbishment of the apex4 circuit having a total of 1252 LUTs with 10% spares is achieved in as few as 633 generations on average when subjected to simulated randomly-injected single stuck-at faults. Moreover, the use of design-time information about the circuit undergoing refurbishment is validated as means to increase the tractability of dynamic evolvable hardware
techniques. 

Index Terms—Evolvable Hardware, SRAM-based FPGAs, Scalability of Genetic Algorithms, Hard/Permanent Fault Refurbishment,
Self-Healing, Survivability, Search Space Pruning, Selective Mutation