Relaxation Based Electrical Simulation for VLSI Circuits

Electrical circuit simulation was one of the first CAD tools developed for IC design. The conventional circuit simulators like SPICE and ASTAP were designed initially for the cost effective analysis of circuits containing a few hundred transistors or less. A number of approaches have been used to improve the performances of congenital circuit simulators for the analysis of large circuits. Thereafter relaxation methods was proposed to provide more accurate waveforms than standard circuit simulators with up to two orders of magnitude speed improvement for large circuits. In this paper we have tried to highlights recently used waveform and point relaxation techniques for simulation of VLSI circuits. We also propose a simple parallelization technique and experimentally demonstrate that we can solve digital circuits with tens of million transistors in a few hours.