Cooperative VLSI Tiled Architectures: Stigmergy in a Swarm Coprocessor

Abstract

Stigmergy is a form of indirect interaction for coordination and communication purposes that can be found in many swarm systems. In this paper we present a tiled coprocessor for computation-intensive applications that explicitly exploits stigmergy to achieve adaptability avoiding the usual time-consuming handshakes involved in direct interactions. This adaptability, without any centralized control, directly implies architectural scalability at design time, flexibility in multitasking environment, adaptive load balancing and fault-tolerance at run-time. A CMOS 0.13μm implementation of such architecture for simple array processing operations is presented and evaluated. Obtained results show the potentiality of the proposed approach.