Comparison of the Uniform and Non-Uniform Cellular Automata-Based Approach to the Development of Combinational Circuits

Cellular automata-based model has been shown as a useful developmental model in the evolutionary design of digital circuits at the gate level. Uniform one-dimensional cellular automata have been successfully applied to the circuit design task so far. Moreover, the initial experiments performed during our previous research have demonstrated the possibility of applying non-uniform cellular automata to the circuits design which is the main objective of the proposed paper. We will investigate this approach considering several classes of combinational circuits, provide an analysis of the obtained results and their comparison with the results of the uniform cellular automata-based model. It will be shown that evolution is able to find (in general a different) local transition function for each cell of the automaton according to which the target circuit is developed. Two different case studies will be presented in order to demonstrate the abilities of the proposed method. The first case study deals with the development of combinational multipliers and the second one is intended to develop combinational dividers. The obtained experimental results will be compared to our previous approach in which uniform cellular automata were applied. The proposed non-uniform approach enables to design circuits that we were not able to develop successfully using the uniform cellular automata.