Development of a distributed IC design workstation environment
Present computer-aided design (CAD) environments are oriented towards increasingly sophisticated workstations networked to enable a common data base and other sharing of resources. There exists a clear potential for increased productivity through distributed processing. The design and development of two distributed IC-CAD tools are presented: distributed circuit simulation and distributed functional simulation. Their structure and performance are evaluated both empirically and analytically. The functional simulator is unique in its use of network-based parallel processing to perform IC design simulation. The circuit simulator demonstrates the viability of network-based parallel processing as an approach to IC-CAD tool development. In event-driven simulation, the interplay of synchronism and processing granularity are such that parallelism is held low in many circuits. A successful distribution of this task will require very low distribution overhead. However, distributed processing is capable of an order-of-magnitude speed improvement in circuit-simulation execution time. This is a significant contribution to the state-of-the art in circuit analysis performance.
- Research Organization:
- Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (USA)
- OSTI ID:
- 7106638
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
990210 -- Supercomputers-- (1987-1989)
990300* -- Information Handling
COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
DATA PROCESSING
DATA-FLOW PROCESSING
DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING
ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS
FUNCTIONALS
FUNCTIONS
INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
MICROELECTRONIC CIRCUITS
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PROCESSING
PROGRAMMING
SIMULATION