I&#x27;m probably missing something, but I don&#x27;t see how this is feasible. Moving all firmware to a device that lives on an external bus means that you must either create a &#x27;trustworthy&#x27; distribution channel for all supported firmware (including all system components and peripheral devices), or support only a select few devices and forbid adding any new peripherals. It also means peripheral devices must either be capable of bootstrapping themselves from this chip, or the system must provide a mechanism that &#x27;sends&#x27; this firmware to all peripherals before booting the system. I&#x27;m inclined to think that the complex interdependency of this boot process seems impractical.<p>Also, I have to disagree that FPGAs are ideal for the architecture proposed by this paper. Performance and state issues of an FPGA aside, they&#x27;re field programmable, which seems more vulnerable than &#x27;microcode updates&#x27;. Of course, you could just disable field programming, but why even use an FPGA in the first place?<p>Disclaimer: I believe Joanna is much smarter than I am, so I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if my comments are based on a fundamental misunderstanding.