Efficient and Effective Digital Waveform Compression for Large-scale Logic Simulation of Integrated Circuit

Zhenyi Gao, Yuyang Xie, Wenjian Yu

Abstract: Efficient and lossless digital waveform compression is essentially important for large-scale IC design. In this paper, a compression and storage scheme with detailed-encoding is proposed for compressing the digital waveform including signal transition and auxiliary information. The proposed scheme encodes different values according to their detailed characteristics and utilizes a modified look-up table to reduce the memory cost for storing signal aliases. It is also integrated into a block-by-block compressing procedure which facilitates the secondary lossless compression, pipeline computation and variable-length coding techniques for fast conversion from the output of simulator to the compressed file. Experiments are carried out with 8 digital waveform files from industrial cases. The results show that the proposed method enables 402X average (and up to 1561X) compression ratio with respect to the original VCD format. Compared to the existing compression method for digital waveform, it costs similar or less time while achieving up to 2.56X more compression with about 20% reduction of memory usage averagely.