Automatic generation of cellular automata on FPGA

Abstract

Cellular automata (CA) have been used to study a great range of fields, through the means of simulation, owing to its computational power and inherent characteristics. Furthermore, CAs can perform task-specific processing. Spacial parallelism, locality and discrete nature are the main features that enable mapping of CA onto the regular architecture of an FPGA; such a hardware solution significantly accelerates the simulation process when compared to software. In this paper, we report on the implementation of a system to automatically generate custom CA architectures for FPGA devices based on a reference design. The FPGA interfaces with a host computer, which initializes the system, downloads the initial CA state information, and controls the CA's operation. The user interface is are provided by a user-friendly graphical desktop application written in Java.