Complex dynamical systems establish offer entirely new possibilities to the development of groundbreaking data processing methods. In the domains of image and video processing, locally coupled cellular array computers, based on Cellular Nonlinear Networks (CNN), accelerate the computation of large amounts of data in real-time, due to their inherent concept of massive parallelism. Current VLSI implementations however, are accompanied by several distinct drawbacks. The computational accuracy of most currently available systems is limited to 8 bit, and the volatilely capacitively stored state values of analogue realisations often lead to errors when multiple tasks are processed sequentially. Moreover, the systems hardly allow to run a CNN program code to provide the full functionality of a CNN-UM. In this contribution, the novel CESAR architecture is proposed for the digital emulation of a time-discrete CNN-UM. The programmable array computer facilitates the powerful computation of consecutive CNN operations and the cost-efficient implementation of several application-specific configurations with variable network size and data representation. The presented architecture retains the inherent parallel paradigm of CNN, and assigns one processing element to each cell of the network. The cell outputs are coupled and stored locally, thus minimising data exchange with external structures and maximising the computation speed. The internal fixed-point multiplications are accelerated by using on-chip DSP resources provided by current FPGAs. By this means, a CNN-based embedded system with 128 cells, a 3 x 3 neighbourhood and 18 bit data representation was implemented on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA.