Abstract
Cellular automaton (CA) is a promising computer paradigm that can break through the von Neumann bottleneck. Two-dimensional CA is especially suitable for application to pixel-level image processing. Although various architectures have been proposed for processing two-dimensional CA, there are no compact, practical computers. So, in spite of its great potential, CA is not widely used. This paper proposes a highly-parallel two-dimensional cellular automaton architecture called CAM 2 and presents some evaluation results. CAM 2 can attain pixel-order parallelism on a single board because it is composed of a CAM, which makes it possible to embed an enormous number processing elements (PEs), corresponding to CA cells, onto one VLSI chip. Multiple-zigzag mapping and dedicated CAM functions enable high-performance CA processing. The performance evaluation results show that 256k CA cells, which correspond to a 512 × 512 picture, can be processed by a CAM 2 on a single board using deep submicron process technology. The processing speed is more than 10 billion CA cell updates per second. This means that more than a thousand CA-based image processing operations can be done on a 512 × 512 pixel image at video rates (33 msec). CAM 2 will widen the potentiality of CA and make a significant contribution to the development of compact and high-performance systems.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 788-801 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Computers |
Volume | 47 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1998 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Cellular automaton
- Content addressable memory
- Multiple-zigzag mapping
- Real-time image processing
- SIMD
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Software
- Theoretical Computer Science
- Hardware and Architecture
- Computational Theory and Mathematics