A Circuit Partitioning Approach for Parallel Circuit Simulation (Special Section on the 6th Karuizawa Workshop on Circuits and Systems)

概要

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We have studied a circuit partitioning approach in the view of parallel circuit simulation on a MIMD parallel computer. In parallel circuit simulation, a circuit is partitioned into equally sized subcircuits while minimizing the number of interconnection nodes. Besides circuit partitioning time should be short enough compared with the total simulation time. From the details of circuit simulation time, we found that balancing subcircuits is critical for low parallel processing, whereas minimizing the interconnection nodes is critical for highly parallel processing. Our circuit partitioning approach consists of four steps: Grouping transistors, initial partitioning the transistor-groups, minimizing the number of interconnection nodes, and balancing the subcircuits. It is based on an algorithmic approach, and can directly control the tradeoffs between balancing subcircuits and minimizing the interconnection nodes by adjusting the parameters. We partitioned a test circuit with 3277 transistors into 4, 9, …, 64 subcircuits, and did parallel simulations using PARACS, our parallel circuit simulator, on an AP1000 parallel computer. The circuit partitioning time was short enough-less than 3 percent of the total simulation time. The highest performance of parallel analysis using 49 processors was 16 times that of a single processor, and that for total simulation was 9 times.
社団法人電子情報通信学会の論文
1994-03-25