Acceleration of Timing-Aware Gate-Level Logic Simulation Through One-Pass GPU Parallelism

Weijie Fang, Yanggeng Fu, Jiaquan Gao, Longkun Guo, Gregory Z. Gutin, Xiaoyan Zhang

Abstract: Witnessing the advancements in the scale and complexity of chip design, along with the benefits from high-performance computing technologies, the simulation of Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuits increasingly demands acceleration through parallel computing with GPU devices. However, conventional parallel strategies fail to fully leverage modern GPU capabilities, introducing new challenges in GPU-based parallelism for VLSI simulations despite previous demonstrations of significant acceleration. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for accelerating the simulation of 4-value logic timing-aware gate-level circuits through waveform-based GPU parallelism. Our approach introduces an innovative strategy that effectively manages task dependencies during the parallelism of combinational circuits, significantly reducing the synchronization requirement between CPU and GPU. The proposed approach achieves one-pass parallelism by requiring only a single round of data transfer. Moreover, to address the implementation challenges associated with our strategy on GPU devices, we have developed and optimized a series of data structures that dynamically allocate and store newly generated outputs of uncertain scale. Finally, we conduct experiments on industrial-scale open-source benchmarks to demonstrate our approach’s performance gains over several state-of-the-art baselines.