In the area of mechanical, aerospace, chemical and civil engineering the solution of partial differential equations has been one of the most important problems in mathematics for a long time. In this field, one of the most exciting areas is the simulation of fluid flow, which involves for example, problems of air, sea and land vehicle motion. In this paper a CNN-UM based solver of 2D inviscid, adiabatic, compressible fluids will be presented. The governing equations are solved by using first- and second-order numerical methods. Unfortunately the necessity of the coupled multi-layered computational structure with nonlinear, space-variant templates does not make it possible to utilize the huge computing power of the analog CNN-UM chips. To improve the performance of our solution emulated digital CNN-UM implemented on FPGA has been used. Properties of the implemented specialized architecture is examined in terms of area, speed and accuracy. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.