Self-adaptive autonomous hardware systems require on-chip heuristics to generate the circuit that consti- utes the desired solution. In this paper, we present a population-oriented hardware architecture for particle swarm optimization with discrete recombination (PSO-DR), a hardware-friendly particle swarm that has shown to per- orm better than the standard PSO for certain parameter values and test functions. We present simulation and syn- hesis results showing the feasibility, performance, and ad- vantages of the proposed architecture.