Using Graphics Processing Units for Logic Simulation of Electronic Designs

Abstract

Logic simulation is the major verification technique used for electronic system designs. Speeding up logic simulation results in great savings and shorter time-to-market. We parallelize logic simulation using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). We present a parallel cycle-based logic simulation algorithm that uses And Inverter Graphs (AIGs) as design representations. We partition the gates in the design into independent blocks and simulate these blocks using the GPU. Our algorithm exploits the massively parallel GPU architecture featuring thousands of concurrent threads, fast memory, and memory coalescing for optimizations. We demonstrate upto 21x speedup on several benchmarks using our simulation system.