An emulated digital wave computer core implementation

Abstract

In this paper, a novel cellular nonlinear network emulator core which executes wave computing within an FPGA-based platform is proposed. This wave computer core has 4 × 4 parallel processing units and emulates 16, 384 nodes which are arranged in 128×128 normal grid form. The wave computer core can be programmed to generate active waves such as autowaves, travelling waves and spiral waves, and also allow to have an inhomogeneous network using fixed-state options. By virtue of its on chip memory and floating point number arithmetics ability, high emulation speed and high precision on variable values are achieved. The FPGA wave computer has not only an on­line monitor output to observe active wave evaluation, also a communication interface which allows to program the network with host computer. The introduced system was experimented in a path planning application and can be used to develop more active wave computing based algorithms for image processing and path planning.