A GPU-accelerated envelope-following method for switching power converter simulation

• Main Authors: Tan, S. X.-D., Liu, Xuexin, Wang, Hai, Yu, Hao
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/99022; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/12797
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In this paper, we propose a new envelope-following parallel transient analysis method for the general switching power converters. The new method first exploits the parallelisim in the envelope-following method and parallelize the Newton update solving part, which is the most computational expensive, in GPU platforms to boost the simulation performance. To further speed up the iterative GMRES solving for Newton update equation in the envelope-following method, we apply the matrix-free Krylov basis generation technique, which was previously used for RF simulation. Last, the new method also applies more robust Gear-2 integration to compute the sensitivity matrix instead of traditional integration methods. Experimental results from several integrated on-chip power converters show that the proposed GPU envelope-following algorithm leads to about 10x speedup compared to its CPU counterpart, and 100x faster than the traditional envelop-following methods while still keeps the similar accuracy.