Automatic generation of cellular automata on FPGA

• Autor(a) principal: André Costa Lima
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Outros Autores: João Canas Ferreira
• Tipo de documento: Livro
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/70154
• topic: Engenharia electrotécnica, electrónica e informática; Electrical engineering, Electronic engineering, Information engineering

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.