Parallel timing simulation on a distributed memory multiprocessor

Circuit simulation is one of the most computationally expensive tasks in circuit design and optimization. Detailed simulation at the level of precision of SPICE is usually performed on critical circuit components only. In this paper we present a parallel timing simulator on a distributed memory multiprocessor, as an attempt to increase the speed and scale of circuit simulation for digital MOS circuits. The parallel implementation is based on the event-driven timing simulator SWEC, which outperforms SPICE by one to two orders of magnitude. Our approach to parallelization exploits runtime parallelism by scheduling the events optimistically. Trace-driven analysis shows that the optimistic simulation method exploits more parallelism than the conservative method for circuits with feedback signal paths. We describe the design tradeo s in the implementation and report on its performance for several benchmark circuits. Speedups over SWEC on large realistic circuits are as high as 60 on a 128-...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1993
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Chih-Po Wen, Katherine A. Yelick
• Keywords: Circuit Simulation, Distributed Memory Multiprocessors, Hardware, ICCAD 1993, Timing Simulator