FPGA Implementations of Cellular Automata for Pseudo-Random Number Generation

This paper present a hardware implementation in a FPGA circuit of an efficient pseudo-random number generator based on cellular automata. We demonstrate in this paper how microscopic (local) interactions influence the overall macroscopic (global) behavior of the whole system. We highlight the possibility to build the evolutionary systems on such a simple mathematical model as a cellular automata space by introducing the rules of evolution of individuals, their interaction, and their robustness to variations of the model. A regular, modular, and cascadable hardware implementation of the generator has been implemented, which is efficient in terms of VLSI technology. The design has been specified in VHDL targeted on a XC3S400 based FPGA and verified for functional correctness by software simulation