The architecture for a hardware immune system

Since the advent of fault tolerance in the 1960s, numerous techniques have been developed to increase the reliability of safety critical and space borne missions. In the last decade novel approaches to this field have sought inspiration from nature in the form of evolutionary and developmental forms of fault tolerance. In nature an additional inspiration axis exists in the form of learning. The body's own immune system uses a form of learning to maintain reliable operation in the body even in the presence of invaders. This has only recently been applied as a computational technique in the form of artificial immune systems (AIS). This paper demonstrates a new application of AIS with an immunologically inspired approach to fault tolerance. It is shown a finite state machine can be provided with a hardware immune system to provide a novel form of fault detection giving the ability to detect every faulty state during a normal operating cycle. We call this immunotronics.

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