PARALLEL IMPLEMENTATION OF CIRCUIT SIMULATION

The importance of circuit simulation in the design of VLSI circuits has channelised research work in the direction of finding methods to speedup this highly compute-intensive problem. On one hand, attempts have been made to find better algorithms and use faster hardware; and on the other hand, to use parallel architectures for accelerating the circuit simulation task. In this paper, we examine the various issues involved in parallelizing two well-known circuit simulation approaches – direct methods and relaxation methods. A number of parallel computer architectures which have been used for this purpose are also surveyed.