Parallel logic simulation of million-gate VLSI circuits

Abstract

The complexity of today's VLSI chip designs makes verification a necessary step before fabrication. As a result, gate-level logic simulation has became an integral component of the VLSI circuit design process which verifies the design and analyzes its behavior. Since the designs constantly grow in size and complexity, there is a need for ever more efficient simulations to keep the gate-level logic verification time acceptably small. The focus of this paper is an efficient simulation of large chip designs. We present the design and implementation of a new parallel simulator, called DSIM, and demonstrate DSIM's efficiency and speed by simulating a million gate circuit using different numbers of processors.