Abstract
In the past, Cellular Automata based models and machines [1] have been proposed for simulation of physical systems without any analytical insight into the behaviour of the underlying simulation machine. This paper makes a significant departure from this traditional approach. An elegant mathematical model using simple matrix algebra is reported in this paper for characterizing the behaviour of two-dimensional nearest neighbourhood linear cellular automata with null and periodic boundary conditions. Based on this mathematical model, a VLSI architecture of a Cellular Automata Machine (CAM) has been proposed. Interesting applications of CAM in the fields of image analysis and fractal image generation are also reported.