Accelerating SPICE Model-Evaluation using FPGAs

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 ir...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kapre, Nachiket, DeHon, André
Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
Format: Conference or Workshop Item
Language:English
Published: 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/81185
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/39198
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary: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 2-18times over a dual-core 3 GHz Intel Xeon 5160 when using a Xilinx Virtex 5 LX330T for a variety of SPICE device models.