Stigmergic approaches applied to flexible fault-tolerant digital VLSI architectures

Parallel implementations are widely used in digital architectures to enhance computational performances, exploiting the number of involved processing units. Cooperative behaviors typical of swarm intelligence can enhance the performances of such systems introducing an amplification effect due to the collective effort of a set of interacting hardware agents. Cooperation can also be exploited like a new weapon to achieve the fault-tolerance goal, with no need for expressly inserted redundant hardware resources. In this paper we present a novel architecture able to address these issues exploiting all the potentiality exposed by this bioinspired approach. A first implementation on CMOS technology shows the feasibility of such a design style, allowing preliminary simulations and discussions.