Specific Circuit for Solving Elliptic PDEs

A specific circuit to solve ΔΨ=f(Ψ), by finite-difference method, in 3D is presented. This circuit has been designed in CMOS-2μm technology, its area is about 0.7 square centimeter (100,000 transistors). Using this circuit to simulate potential distribution in silicon devices shows a drastic reduction of the computation time, 1.7 μs per discretization node against 900 μs by a software approach. This circuit is a processing element of a SIMD system devoted to solve large systems of algebraic equations in a PC-type environment.