A methodology for minimum area cellular automata generation

Cellular automata (CAs) have been adopted in several VLSI applications to generate pseudo-random sequences. CAs should be able to generate maximum cycle length pseudo-random sequences. As they are built into high performance VLSI chips they should also present minimum area. Previous works on CAs generation have failed, up to now, to solve the problem. In this paper we present a "guided search" methodology to generate such minimum area CAs. Results are compared to the ones obtained in previous works and the area gain reported.