Improving the performance of parallel relaxation-based circuit simulators

Describes methods of increasing parallelism, thereby improving the performance, of waveform relaxation-based parallel circuit simulators. The key contribution is the use of parallel nonlinear relaxation and parallel model evaluation to solve large subcircuits that may lead to load balancing problems. These large subcircuits are further partitioned and solved on clusters of tightly-coupled multiprocessors. This paper describes a general hybrid/hierarchical approach for waveform relaxation, and then focuses on the implementation issues regarding parallel nonlinear relaxation and parallel model evaluation. A number of benchmark circuits are used to demonstrate the improved performance of this approach and its range of applicability in parallel circuit simulation