ISTR something like this was developed in Great Britain about 20 years ago, called "starlite", and could be painted onto objects to protect from intense heat radiation.

I suspect we shall see them by the year 2002!

Motherboard containing FPGAs combined with dedicated hardware, allows downloadable FPGA cores to emulate CPU models, "chipsets" and architectures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-One