URI: | http://purl.tuc.gr/dl/dias/B55945D2-3D8F-4817-88A2-CC64C58C1D0B | ||
Year | 2024 | ||
Type of Item | Diploma Work | ||
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Bibliographic Citation | Emmanouil Mylonakis, "Development of a CAD tool and hardware design in order to execute cellular automata on a reconfigurable platform by non-FPGA-Conversant users ", Diploma Work, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece, 2024 https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.98831 | ||
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Relations with other Items | Is Successor of Item: |
Cellular Automata (CA) are Turing-Complete, discrete, computational models, invented by John Von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam. It is a powerful mathematical tool, finding application to numerous scientific fields. Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Technology has been used for decades to speed up CA computations. In previous work, Nikolaos Kyparissas designed in his Technical University of Crete (TUC) M.Eng. Diploma Thesis a customizable framework and an architecture to accelerate CA computations, with neighborhoods as large as 29 $\times $ 29. In Kyparissas' work the initialization of the machine and the customization of the framework have to be manually re-defined for every different CA model, and the design placed and routed with the CAD tools of the FPGA vendor, Xilinx. In the present thesis we extend that work so that the user does not need to write code for the hardware implementation or go through the Xilinx CAD tools for placement and routing. A re-programmable structure of the framework has been introduced, while a new CAD tool, developed in the present thesis, drives the design at the software level. Finally, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) environment has also been developed to help the user define CA neighborhoods without having to enter one-by-one the as-many-as 841 (29 $\times $ 29) weights.