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Accelerating SPICE Model-Evaluation using FPGAs

Nachiket Kapre and André DeHon
Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, pp. 37--44 (FCCM, April 5--7, 2009)



Single-FPGA spatial implementations can provide an order of magnitude speedup over sequential microprocessor implementations for data-parallel, floating-point computation in SPICE model-evaluation. Model-evaluation is a key component of the SPICE circuit simulator and it is characterized by large irregular floating-point compute graphs. We show how to exploit the parallelism available in these graphs on single-FPGA designs with a low-overhead VLIW-scheduled architecture. Our architecture uses spatial floating-point operators coupled to local high-bandwidth memories and interconnected by a time-shared network. We retime operation inputs in the model-evaluation to allow independent scheduling of computation and communication. With this approach, we demonstrate speedups of 2--18x over a dual-core 3GHz Intel Xeon 5160 when using a Xilinx Virtex 5 LX330T for a variety of SPICE device models.

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N.b. See journal version for composite SPICE implementation.

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