Publications

A hybrid approach for parallel transistor-level full-chip circuit simulation

Thornquist, Heidi K.; Rajamanickam, Sivasankaran R.

The computer-aided design (CAD) applications that are fundamental to the electronic design automation industry need to harness the available hardware resources to be able to perform full-chip simulation for modern technology nodes (45nm and below). We will present a hybrid (MPI+threads) approach for parallel transistor-level transient circuit simulation that achieves scalable performance for some challenging large-scale integrated circuits. This approach focuses on the computationally expensive part of the simulator: the linear system solve. Hybrid versions of two iterative linear solver strategies are presented, one takes advantage of block triangular form structure while the other uses a Schur complement technique. Results indicate up to a 27x improvement in total simulation time on 256 cores.