Literature Survey on GPU Accelerated Circuit Simulation

Analysis, Testing and validation of electronic circuit is very crucial in industries of electronics and embedded systems. Instead of actual hardware testing, simulation software is used for this purpose. Very large circuit design like VLSI testing, affects speed and accuracy of such software tools. So there is the need to increase speed of simulation software without compromising quality. GPUs(Graphics Processing Unit) as a many core processors, are used for parallel processing. To get the advantage of parallel processing in circuit simulation, GPUs can be helpful. This paper explores various methods to accelerate electronic circuit simulation by using parallel processing on GPU. Event-driven, gate-level, model driven approaches are discussed here. Parallelism is induced in mathematical methods used for finding various parameters like voltage, current etc. Speed can be increased from 2 to 150 times for various designs.