Functional organisms growing on silicon

Abstract

This paper describes a novel architecture inspired from the multicellular organizations found in Nature. This architecture is tailored to let functional organisms (logical functions) grow on silicon. To this aim, the silicon surface is populated with an array of identical programmable cells, which may be configured by a bitstream. By analogy with the biological world, the concatenation of the bitstreams used to program the cells composing a given function is called the “genome” of that function. In addition to conventional BIST (Built-in Self-Test) structures addressing signal line faults, this new version tolerates failures affecting power supply. It also allows the growth of differentiated organisms on the same surface by including a code in the genome to distinguish them. As a testbed, we have developped an integrated circuit prototype, code name GenomIC. It contains only a single 4-cell structure, but prefigures which kind of structure can be massively integrated in very large circuits in order to manage complexity (multicellular organization), evolvability (genetic data manipulation) as well as fault tolerance.