Cellular Automaton-based nanoelectronic hardware

Computing-in-Memory has recently attracted increasing interest because of the expected limitations to be faced by the traditional von Neumann architecture under further extensions of Moore´s law. Cellular architectures are especially well positioned as candidates in this context. The most well-known among these are Cellular Automata (CA), which are computing devices with a regular structure of cells that are locally interconnected to each other. Their regularity facilitates manufacturing methods, like Interference Lithography (IL), that can produce high-density patterns of extreme regularity. When this technology is combined with bottom-up methods based on self-assembly, architectures become possible with extremely high numbers of identical cells that can be configured to conduct a wide variety of functions. This paper gives a focused introduction to cellular designs over the last 50 years and discusses their suitability for nanoelectronic implementations.