  The notions of universality and completeness are central in the theories of
computation and computational complexity. However, proving lower bounds and
necessary conditions remains hard in most of the cases. In this article, we
introduce necessary conditions for a cellular automaton to be "universal",
according to a precise notion of simulation, related both to the dynamics of
cellular automata and to their computational power. This notion of simulation
relies on simple operations of space-time rescaling and it is intrinsic to the
model of cellular automata. Intrinsinc universality, the derived notion, is
stronger than Turing universality, but more uniform, and easier to define and
study. Our approach builds upon the notion of communication complexity, which
was primarily designed to study parallel programs, and thus is, as we show in
this article, particulary well suited to the study of cellular automata: it
allowed to show, by studying natural problems on the dynamics of cellular
automata, that several classes of cellular automata, as well as many natural
(elementary) examples, could not be intrinsically universal.
