A Simulated Annealing Technique for Optimizing Time Warp Simulation

According to Moore´s law the complexity of VLSI circuits has doubled approximately every two years, resulting in simulation becoming the major bottleneck in the circuit design process. Parallel and distributed simulations can be applied as fast, cost effective approaches to the simulation of large, complex circuits. In this paper, a simple yet effective simulated annealing-based approach is proposed to optimize the choice of a time window for optimistic parallel simulation. We chose gate level circuits simulations as our experimental vehicle. Our results show up to a 52% improvement in the simulation time using our simulated annealing algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that SA has been applied to optimize the performance of time warp simulations.