Workshops

What Does It Take to Accelerate SPICE on the GPU?

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Lung-Sheng Chien

2013-12-05
11:10:00 - 12:00:00

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In this talk we will introduce the basic concepts behind The Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE) and discuss in detail the two most time consuming parts of the circuit simulation: the device model evaluation and the solution of large sparse linear systems. In particular, we focus on the evaluation of the basic models, such as resistor, capacitor and inductor as well as more complex transistor (BSIM4v7) model on the GPU. Also, we discuss the solution of sets of linear systems that are performed throughout the simulation. We take advantage of the fact that the coefficient matrices in these linear systems have the same sparsity pattern (and often end up with the same pivoting strategy) and show how to obtain their solution using a direct method on the GPU. Finally, we present numerical experiments and discuss future work.