Direct circuit simulation algorithms for parallel processing (VLSI)

Abstract

The improvement in computational throughput of VLSI circuit simulation is addressed. A high degree of natural parallelism exists in the circuit simulation problem; potentially a large number of processor can be used efficiently. Three distinct approaches for obtaining parallel execution in direct-method circuit simulators are investigated. These approaches differ primarily in the size of the individual tasks used to obtain parallel execution. The relative advantages of each approach are examined, and performance data from simulations on parallel processing systems are presented. For the third approach, very good parallel efficiency was obtained; in some cases, 99% parallelism has been observed.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>