Handbook of Silicon Based MEMS Materials and Technologies

10.5.1. Cellular Automata

A cellular automaton is a discrete model of the physical system consisting of an n-dimensional lattice whose nodes, cells, sites, or atoms can be present in one of many states, where “many” can also be infinite. Based on the current state and number of neighboring sites, the state of each site changes after every time step by applying the same set of rules to all sites simultaneously. A simple example is given in Figure 10.2a.

For the simulation of etching one distinguishes between the Discrete Cellular Automata (DCA) and the Continuous Cellular Automata (CCA). They differ in the number of states available for each atom site. In DCA the sites have only two states, either occupied (1) or empty (0). For CCA the sites ...