A Programmable Hardware Cellular Automaton : Example of Data Flow Transformation

We present an IP-core called PHCA for Programmable Hardware Cellular Automaton (CA). PHCA is a hardware implementation of a general purpose cellular automaton entirely programmable. The heart of this structure is a PE array with reconfigurable side links allowing to implement a 2-D CA or a 1-D CA. As an illustration of a PHCA program we present the implementation of a symmetric cryptography algorithm called ISEA for Ising Spin Encryption Algorithm. Indeed ISEA is based on a 2-D Ising spin lattice presenting random series of disordered spin configurations. The main idea of ISEA is to use the disordered spin configurations to encrypt data.