A prototype parallel multi-FPGA accelerator for SPICE CMOS model evaluation

Abstract

Due to ever increasing complexity of circuits, EDA tools and algorithms are demanding more computational power. This made transistor-level simulation a growing bottleneck in the circuit development process. This thesis serves as a proof of concept to evaluate and quantify the cost of using multi-FPGA systems in SPICE-like simulations in terms of acceleration, throughput, area, and power. To this end, a multi-FPGA architecture is designed to exploit the inherent parallelism in the device model evaluation phase within the SPICE simulator. A code transformation flow which converts the high-level device model code to structural VHDL was also implemented. This flow showed that an automatic compiler system to design, map, and optimise SPICE-like simulations on FPGAs is feasible.

This thesis has two main contributions. The first contribution is the multi-FPGA accelerator of the device model evaluation which demonstrated speedup of 10 times over a conventional processor, while consuming six times less power. Results also showed that it is feasible to describe and optimise FPGA pipelined implementations to exploit other class of applications similar to the SPICE device model evaluation. The constant throughput of the pipelined architecture is one of the main factors for the FPGA accelerator to outperform conventional processors. The second contribution lies in the use of multi-FPGA synthesis to optimise the inter-FPGA connections through altering the process of mapping partitions to FPGA devices. A novel technique is introduced which reduces the inter-FPGA connections by an average of 18%.

The speedup and power efficiency results showed that the proposed multi-FPGA system can be used by the SPICE community to accelerate the transistor-level simulation. The experimental results also showed that it is worthwhile continuing this research further to explore the use of FPGAs to accelerate other EDA tools.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Mark Zwolinski: orcid.org/0000-0002-2230-625X

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