Cellular Automata—Theory and Applications

Abstract

Advances in microelectronics have made possible design of a wide variety of innovative structures with Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits, However, design of complex VLSI circuits within reasonable cost demands two essential pre-requisites—‘regularity’ and ‘simplicity’. These two qualities are inherent to the Cellular Automata (CA) structure. A large variety of physical systems have been simulated using this structure. A survey of all such major developments have been reported in the present paper. It highlights a wide variety of applications which can be tackled by the CA hardware built around VLSI technology. After surveying general CA structure, the paper concentrates on the theory and applications of additive cellular automata as a built-in-self-test structure within a VLSI chip.