Hardware modelling of cellular automata: The game of life case

Abstract

In this paper a study about the modelling, simulation and implementation on reconfigurable hardware of the Conway's Game of Life is shown. The Game of Life is a very popular case of cellular automata. The purpose of this study was to know the capability to model cellular automata by means of the high level hardware description language Handel-C, and to determine a first approximation to the hardware performance of the algorithm by means of the simulation of the implementation on reconfigurable FPGA devices. We can say, thanks to the found results, that the employed modelling technique allows us to prototype easily in short time this kind of algorithms, and the obtained simulation timing results are better than the found in a software version, up to a determined high number of iterations of the game. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.