A Genetic Representation for Evolutionary Fault Recovery in Virtex FPGAs

Abstract. Most evolutionary approaches to fault recovery in FPGAs focus on evolving alternative logic configurations as opposed to evolving the intra-cell routing. Since the majority of transistors in a typical FPGA are dedicated to interconnect, nearly 80 % according to one estimate, evolutionary fault-recovery systems should benefit by accommodating routing. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary fault-recovery system employing a genetic representation that takes into account both logic and routing configurations. Experiments were run using a software model of the Xilinx Virtex FPGA. We report that using four Virtex combinational logic blocks, we were able to evolve a 100 % accurate quadrature decoder finite state machine in the presence of a stuck-at-zero fault.