On Performance Enhancement of Circuit Simulation Using Multithreaded Techniques

Author

Perng, Ruey-Kuen ; Weng, Tien-hsiung ; Li, Kuan-Ching

Author_Institution

Mentor Graphics Corp., Hsinchu, Taiwan

Volume

1

fYear

2009

fDate

29-31 Aug. 2009

Firstpage

158

Lastpage

165

Abstract

This paper presents the multithreaded programming techniques used in parallelizing SPICE3 circuit simulator. Two approaches in multithread programming are proposed to parallelize SPICE3 simulator program in multi-core SMP systems. We have used OpenMP and Pthreads, two shared memory programming-interface standards, to realize our approaches, in order to redesign the SPICE3 device-loading functions. We have presented case studies using SRAM circuit as our input data, which consists of MOS devices that is modeled by a widely used BSIM3 model. Experimental result exhibits the performance improvement for the multithreaded implementation of SPICE3 circuit simulator.

Keywords

SPICE; SRAM chips; circuit simulation; multi-threading; OpenMP; Pthreads; SPICE3 circuit simulator; SRAM circuit; circuit simulation; multithreaded programming techniques; performance enhancement; shared memory programming-interface standards; simulation program with integrated circuit emphasis circuit simulator; Circuit simulation; Computational modeling; Computer simulation; Discrete event simulation; Equations; Integrated circuit modeling; MOSFET circuits; Parallel programming; SPICE; Very large scale integration; Circuit simulation; Multithread; OpenMP; Pthreads;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computational Science and Engineering, 2009. CSE '09. International Conference on

Conference_Location

Vancouver, BC

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-5334-4

Electronic_ISBN

978-0-7695-3823-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CSE.2009.361

Filename

5283746