CSDL & GLIDER: CAD Tools for Hardware Implementation of Cellular Automata

Abstract

Cellular Automata (CA) are discrete dynamical systems. Physically, a CA consists of consist of a lattice of discrete identical sites called cells, each one taking a value from a finite set. The values of the cells evolve in discrete steps according to deterministic rules that specify the value of the cell in terms of the values of the neighboring sites. Due to its massive parallelism, CA are not appropriated to be implemented on classical, sequential resources such as microprocessors, but adapt better to digital electronic structures such as FPGAs. In this paper, two tools oriented to the hardware implementations of CA are presented. CSDL is a language specifically oriented to define a wide range of cellular nets and, Glider, allows to make graphically these definitions and export it to a hardware description language.