Hierarchical solution of linear algebraic equations on transputer trees for circuit simulation

The authors propose to have a binary tree structure to implement a nested dissection method of the circuit decomposition. In other words, the computation of the circuit equations solution is shared by each node in the tree, where each node represents a processor. In this way, the authors hope to efficiently deal with multi-level hierarchy of circuit blocks which often occur in description of VLSI circuits. Second, they suggest a hierarchical partitioning of the Jacobi iterative method for solving linear equations. The equation set is hierarchically structured in the same way as the concurrent machine which executes it. Therefore, this multiprocessor architecture for solution of the circuit equations consists of hierarchically interconnected sub-matrix solvers executing identical code. Finally, they present the results obtained on a network of transputers T414, and compare the relative performance with the results obtained on a microVAX 2000 which was programmed to solve the same equations by means of a simple sequential program written in C