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Abstract - Throughout the time, evolution processes of biological organisms are characterized by self-healing, adaptation and not the last, surviving abilities. Mimicking all these features in VLSI circuits, this has lead to technological improvements that make possible the designing and building of fault-tolerant systems. Because complexity is almost a requirement of these systems, in order to exhibit the above mentioned features, designing and simulating them efficiently, require a tailored modeling and simulation environment. By studying the design and implementation flow of embryonic systems, it can be concluded that a modeling and simulation environment has to have the capabilities of modeling through a programming language, as close as possible to the implementation methods, and in the same time the power of simulating in real-time. The paper focuses on presenting a new modeling and simulation environment, giving an example of a structure for an embryonic system.
Keywords: Real-time; Simulation environment; Embryonic system; Fault-tolerant system; Bio-inspired
I. INTRODUCTION
All the living organisms are endowed by nature with distinct evolution capabilities like self-healing abilities, surviving and adaptation, encoding them genetically. To design complex fault-tolerant hardware, these capabilities are a key feature to include [1, 2]. Most of the computer aided design and simulation environments, typically involved in these processes, either natural or replicated in hardware, approach them in a classical fashion, where the simulation runs for a while and after done, the results are presented for analysis or further post processing. The design and build time of a bioinspired hardware system is drastically reduced if the simulation runs in real-time, presenting to the user how a process evolves and where or when the process fails [3]. In such a system, a bug in software code is very difficult if not impossible to spot or trace when using a non real-time simulation. In a classical simulation, although the results present various design defects, the complexity of the system hinders the defect tracing.
A major advantage of a real-time simulation is that it can accept external stimuli or even altering parts of the simulated model, during run time [3]. Such a feature is beneficial either for design improvements or debugging. From different points of view, the simulation of embryonic systems raise several types of difficulties. One is regarding the incapability...