ABSTRACT
The simulations of circuit Helsinki University of Technology (TKK)-Circuit Theory Laboratory (CTL) is a typical VLSI workhorse. Given SPICE’s crucial role in the integrated circuit (IC) conceptual design, an acceleration of the TKK-CTL was of great significance. Since a substantial proportion of the TKK-CTL duration (on average 75%) is spent on the assessment of transistor numerical solutions, a considerable speed may be used when these assessments are expedited. This chapter discusses our early efforts to speed up transistor model analyses with a graphics processing unit (GPU). With a commercial TKK-CTL tool, we have incorporated this accelerator. This shows that substantial accelerations might be achieved (2.36× on average). The asymptotic acceleration is around 4 times. We show that speedups in the area of this asymptotic magnitude may be attained with circuits consisting of as little as 1,000 transistors. This speedup can be further boosted, especially for bigger designs, by using the recently announced (but presently not available) quad GPU devices.
