Characterization of Single Length Cycle Two-Attractor Cellular Automata Using Next-State Rule Minterm Transition Diagram

Cellular automata (CAs) are simple mathematical models that are effectively being used to analyze and understand the behavior of complex systems. Researchers from a wide range of fields are interested in CAs due to their potential for representing a variety of physical, natural and real-world phenomena. Three-neighborhood one-dimensional CAs, a special class of CAs, have been utilized to develop various applications in the field of very large-scale integration (VLSI) design, error-correcting codes, test pattern generation, cryptography and others. A thorough analysis of a three-neighborhood cellular automaton (CA) with two states per cell is presented in this paper. A graph-based tool called the next-state rule minterm transition diagram (NSRTD) is presented for analyzing the state transition behavior of CAs with fixed points. A linear time mechanism has been proposed for synthesizing a special class of irreversible CAs referred to as single length cycle two-attractor CAs (TACAs), having only two fixed points.