Automation of metabolic P system implementation in FPGA: A case study

Metabolic P (MP) systems were proposed by V. Manca in 2005. They evolved from and are based on membrane computing, also known as P systems. P systems have been implemented already, however there are no known equivalent implementations of MP systems. We have developed software written in Python interpreted programming language to convert the MP system represented in simple text format to Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL). Then the generated VHDL component can be easily merged into supplementary code and implemented in a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). In the article the new automated implementation technique is shown to work well in two separate cases: the model of Glucose-Insulin interactions in the intravenous glucose tolerance test and the Non Photochemical Quenching process. This is represented by the calculation accuracy, speed and used resources parameters. We verified that the MP system VHDL code generation tool is valid for automated MP system implementation in FPGA.