Partial differential equations have conventionally formed a basis for mathematical models of continuous systems. Cellular automata provide an alternative approach. The large scope of applications of cellular automata (in biology, physics, operational research, sociology, computer science and so on) will surely increase the need of such a tool. The basic constitutive cells are discrete and ideally suited to simulation by digital computers. Their property of only interacting in a local environment naturally leads to a new idea of processing: cellular processing. In fact, the simulation of cellular automata with mainframe computers, even with parallel multiprocessors, is always slowed down by the input/output bottleneck. This paper describes the architecture of a compact accelerator for cellular automata. This multi-expandable machine is based on a pipeline architecture which concurrently performs computations and displays results. The underlying principle is to spy on the display bus by grabbing the data flow pouring out to the display device and simultaneously to evaluate the state of each automaton in the network. The performance of the machine reaches the video rate: it computes and displays the state of the 1024/spl times/1024 16-bit automata 24 times per second. FPGAs play a key role in the architecture of the system.
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