Parallel circuit simulation on supercomputers

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. 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 are primarily related to general-purpose multiprocessors with a shared-memory architecture having a limited number of processors, although many of the comments apply to a number of other architectures.<
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