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A New Distributed Parallel Event-driven Timing Simulation for ECO Design Changes

Authors:
Seiyang Yang
Doohwan Kwak
Jaehoon Han
Namdo Kim

Keywords: distributed parallel simulation; synchronization; communication; partitioning; simulator; simulation; verification; EDA

Abstract:
Prediction-based distributed parallel event-driven hardware description language simulation on multi-core computing platforms is a new promising approach to boost simulation performance. Traditional distributed parallel event- driven simulation methods suffer heavy synchronization and communication overhead for transferring the signal data among local simulators, which could easily nullify most of the expected simulation speed-up from parallelization. In our approach, the signal data to be transferred is predicted first in each local simulation independently. No synchronization and communication incurs when the prediction succeeds, and the actual signal data transfer with synchronization and communication among the local simulators occurs only when the prediction fails. Therefore, as far as prediction accuracy remains high, the high simulation speed-up from the parallelization can be anticipated from the approach. In this paper, we have proposed the prediction-based distributed parallel event-driven timing simulation for a series of design changes in typical ECO flow. We also have performed the preliminary experimentation in actual design changes, obtained high prediction accuracy with real designs from industry and achieved significant speed-up gain from the proposed parallelization.

Pages: 169 to 173

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2013

Publication date: October 27, 2013

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4537

ISBN: 978-1-61208-308-7

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from October 27, 2013 to October 31, 2013