A cellular automaton for the propagation of circular fronts and its applications

Artificial intelligence techniques are widely used to solve complicated manufacturing and fabrication process problems in today's industrial world. Cellular automata (CAs) have been applied numerous times as an evolvable technique to the solution of some of the aforementioned complicated problems with great success due to their inherent parallelism, structural locality, regularity and modularity. One of the most difficult problems that CAs dealt with in several cases (i.e. integrated circuit fabrication, pattern recognition and classification, computer aided design, machine vision, etc.) is the identification and the reproduction of circular fronts and shapes. In this paper a CA is used to propagate circular fronts. This CA has an extended Moore neighborhood and a relatively simple local rule based on Boolean operators. Simulation results of an integrated circuit fabrication process, namely chemical vapor deposition based on the proposed CA are also presented. These results were found to be in very good qualitative agreement with the experimental results published in the literature. Moreover, because of the CA's binary states and its local rule simplicity, the VLSI implementation of the proposed CA is straightforward.