Compression of Simulation Results by Sampling

It is very common in today's design practice to simulate a big design with a large set of test vectors thereby generating a huge set of data(simulation results) to be analyzed. As the size of the design increases, the simulation results grow and become harder to be handled. In this paper, we present algorithms for compression and regeneration of simulation results. The compression is performed by sampling nets in a circuit. If the user wants to examine the lost part of the data, it can be quickly regenerated using incremental simulation technique. Experimental results obtained for several benchmark and practical circuits show that the compression ratio of 10 can be easily obtained while missing data can be regenerated within a reasonable time limit on a 15.7 MIPS workstation.