CSDL & GLIDER: Tools for implementing cellular structures into FPGAs

Cellular Automata (CA) 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, Cellular Structure Description Language (CSDL) and Glider are presented. CSDL is a language specifically oriented to define a wide range of cellular nets. CSDL allows defining a cell and describing the interconnection between cells by simply selecting a topological distribution and mapping inputs to outputs in a regular way. After compilation, a CSDL file can be used in several development systems, both for software, simulation purposes or for hardware implementation.