Self-Organization on Silicon: System Integration of a Fixed-Point Swarm Coprocessor

Self-organization is the property of some natural systems to organize themselves without a central coordination unit to perform specific tasks. In this paper, the FPGA prototype of a digital architecture based on a bio-inspired coprocessor for fixed-point array processing is presented. The coprocessor is designed around a tiled architectures resorting to the principles of Swarm Intelligence to perform the assigned tasks with simultaneous adaptive multitasking capabilities exploiting cooperative behaviors and self-organization, without any hardware configuration. Profiling results on some sample application shows performance improvements up to 36 times with respect to the execution on the processor only.