A new partitioning method for parallel simulation of VLSI circuits on transistor level

Simulation is still one of the most important subtasks when designing a VLSI circuit. However more and more elements on a chip increase simulation runtimes. Especially on transistor level with highly accurate element modelling, long simulation runtimes of typically several hours delay the design process. One possibility to reduce these runtimes is to divide the circuit into several partitions and to simulate the partitions in parallel. But the success of such a parallel simulation is heavily dependent on the quality of the partitioning. This paper presents a new approach for partitioning VLSI circuits on transistor level and gives runtimes of parallel simulations of large industrial circuits. The resulting runtimes show considerable improvement compared to a known partitioning method, the node tearing method