Parallel circuit simulation on supercomputers

Journal Article · Thu Nov 30 23:00:00 EST 1989 · Proceedings of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); (USA)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/5.48832· OSTI ID:6845636

Saleh, R A; Gallivan, K A ^[1]; Chang, M C ^[2]; Hajj, I N; Trick, T N ^[3]; Smart, D ^[4]

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1. Illinois Univ., Urbana, IL (USA). Center for Supercomputing Research and Development
2. Texas Instruments, Inc., Dallas, TX (USA)
3. Illinois Univ., Urbana, IL (USA). Coordinated Science Lab.
4. Semiconductor Div., Analog Devices, Wilmington, MA (US)

Circuit simulation is a very time-consuming and numerically intensive application, especially when the problem size is large as in the case of VLSI circuits. To improve the performance of circuit simulators without sacrificing accuracy, a variety of parallel processing algorithms have been investigated due to the recent availability of a number of commercial multiprocessor machines. In this paper, research in the field of parallel circuit simulation is surveyed and the ongoing research in this area at the University of Illinois is described. Both standard and relaxation-based approaches are considered. In particular, the forms of parallelism available within the direct method approach, used in programs such as SPICE2 and SLATE, and within the relaxation-based approaches, such as waveform relaxation, iterated timing analysis, and waveform-relaxation-Newton, are described. The specific implementation issues addressed here are primarily related to general-purpose multiprocessors with a shared-memory architecture having a limited number of processors, although many of the comments also apply to a number of other architectures.

• OSTI ID: 6845636
• Journal Information: Proceedings of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); (USA), Journal Name: Proceedings of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); (USA) Vol. 77:12; ISSN IEEPA; ISSN 0018-9219
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

42 ENGINEERING
426000 -- Engineering-- Components
Electron Devices & Circuits-- (1990-)
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990200* -- Mathematics & Computers
ARRAY PROCESSORS
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
COMPUTER CODES
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
COMPUTERS
DIGITAL COMPUTERS
ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS
INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
ITERATIVE METHODS
MICROELECTRONIC CIRCUITS
NEWTON METHOD
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PROGRAMMING
RELAXATION
RESEARCH PROGRAMS
S CODES
SIMULATION
SUPERCOMPUTERS