ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the main concepts of cellular neural networks (CNN)s. The various issues have been described with the aim of focusing the attention on the possibility offered by CNNs to conceive analog circuits emulating complex dynamics. The CNN scheme represents an analog system made by a huge number of differential equations. Moreover, more complex transformations can be achieved by subsequently processing different templates, exactly like a datum can be processed by the various instructions of a computer program. This duality among the templates and the computer instructions is the basis of the dual computing and led to the introduction of the CNN Universal Machine (CNN-UM). Approaching the choice of the cloning templates as a design problem is equivalent to building a dynamical system with the constraint of the CNN model and choosing the templates in such a way that the dynamics of the designed system evolves in the desired manner.
