Fault tolerant virtual machine architecture for advanced avionics applications

An advanced highly fault tolerant avionics processing architecture concept is described. This architecture acts as a “virtual machine” to provide flexibility and reconfigurability, and thus exceptional fault tolerance, at both the application software and the hardware implementation levels. The system has the characteristic that failure of any one hardware element will result in no loss of functionality or performance, and additional failures will cause at most a graceful degradation of capabilities