A self-healing single core architecture using dynamically reconfigurable devices

The IT industry has been focusing for several years on providing to users and designers the possibility of creating software applications disregarding hardware resources. Multi-processor architectures seem to be more of interest in recent developments because of their capacity to exploit programmable parallelism at acceptable costs without posing severe software designing problems. But in any thinkable scenario, software will always be dependent on the hardware it is executing on. In another matter of speaking, hardware performances will always affect software´s ability in providing results. There is also the question if the gathered results are correct or not, if the system that provides them is fast, safe and if it is a reliable and a maintainable one. This paper proposes a scalable architecture surrounding a single core microprocessor with the purpose of increasing computational speed and reliability. For achieving this, a flexible hardware platform would be appropriate, e.g. field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The single core system will revolve around a Picoblaze soft-core microprocessor. By generating a series of modules with the same functionality as the executing software, an N-module redundancy system will increase systems security and reliability.