SUMMARYFault tolerance is an important feature for the system LSIs used in reliability-critical systems. Although redundancy techniques are generally used to provide fault tolerance, these techniques have significantly hardware costs. However, FPGAs can easily provide high reliability due to their reconfiguration ability. Even if faults occur, the implemented circuit can perform correctly by reconfiguring to a fault-free region of the FPGA. In this paper, we examine an FPGA-IP core loaded in SoC and introduce a fault-tolerant technology based on fault detection and recovery as a CAD-level approach. To detect fault position, we add a route to the manufacturing test method proposed in earlier research and identify fault areas. Furthermore, we perform fault recovery at the logic tile and multiplexer levels using reconfiguration. The evaluation results for the FPGA-IP core loaded in the system LSI demonstrate that it was able to completely identify and avoid fault areas relative to the faults in the routing area.

A moving table supported by aerostatic bearings can achieve excellent accuracy of motion because of its noncontact support and, hence, it is used in various precision machine tools and measuring equipment. However, because of low viscosity of air, the damping coefficient of aerostatic bearings is not very high, causing vibration with nanometer-order amplitudes. The accuracy of machine tools and measuring equipment could deteriorate because of this vibration. It is expected that water hydrostatic bearings would have a higher damping coefficient than aerostatic bearings due to the higher viscosity of water. In addition, water, like air, does not pollute the environment. In this paper, the static and dynamic characteristics of water hydrostatic thrust bearings using porous material were numerically investigated and comparedwith conventional pocket hydrostatic bearings with a capillary restrictor. Hydrostatic porous bearings can be easily constructed because the porous material becomes a viscous restrictor itself. It was consequently found that water hydrostatic porous thrust bearings have higher maximum load capacity and slightly lower stiffness than water bearings with a capillary restrictor.

Although redundancy techniques are generally used to provide fault tolerance for the system large scale integrations (LSIs), these techniques have significantly costs. However, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can easily provide high reliability due to their reconfiguration ability. The present paper proposes an effective fault detection method for the global interconnects of the FPGA. In the proposed method, by combining different kinds of test patterns, the fault resources can be identified. We also developed placement and routing tools to avoid fault resources in two cases, namely, tile-level avoidance and multiplexer-level avoidance. In the evaluation of the proposed technique, the proposed detection method diagnosed a defect multiplexer with six test configurations. We found that the fault FPGA can achieve the same performance as normal FPGA in multiplexer-level avoidance.

Gold nanowires are expected to be applied to biosensing due to their advantages such as high stability and biocompatibility. However, it is still inconvenient to fabricate a single gold nanowire...

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