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Electronic Design Automation (EDA)

 
 
EDA involves a diverse set of software algorithms and applications that are required for the design of complex next generation semiconductor and electronics products. The increase in VLSI design complexity poses a significant challenge to EDA; application performance is not scaling effectively since microprocessor performance gains have been hampered due to increases in power and manufacturability issues, which accompany scaling. Digital systems are typically validated by distributing logic simulation tasks among huge compute farms for weeks at a time. Yet, the performance of simulation often falls behind, leading to incomplete verification and missed functional bugs. It is indeed no surprise that the semiconductor industry is always seeking for faster simulation solutions.

Recent trends in HPC are increasingly exploiting many-core GPUs to a competitive advantage through the use of such GPUs as a massively-parallel CPU co-processor to achieve speed up of computationally intensive EDA simulations including Verilog simulation, Signal Integrity & Electromagnetics, Computational Lithography, SPICE circuit simulation and more.
 
Verilog Simulation on GPUs with RocketSim [learn more]
(Source: Tomer Ben-David, Rocketick, Israel)
 
 

GPU accelerated full wave EM simulation to analyze crosstalk on the opposite side of the package
(Source: Martin Timm, CST, Germany)

ISV Applications Using CUDA

ISV Description GPU Advantage
Agilent Technologies EMPro Modeling and simulation environment for analyzing 3D EM effects of high speed and RF/Microwave components 6X speedup with 1 GPU; faster & more accurate simulations
Agilent Technologies ADS Simulation tool for design of RF, microwave and high speed digital circuits Enables signal integrity designers to run 4-6X faster than on a CPU workstation
ANSYS Nexxim Circuit simulation engine for RF/analog/mixed-signal IC design; IBIS-AMI analysis speedup with GPU computing. Significant speed-up over multi-core CPUs
CST Microwave Studio (MWS) High frequency electromagnetic field simulation. 9X speedup with 1 GPU; over 20X+ faster with 4 GPUs
Gauda OPC, OPV Collection of several software tools for computational lithography running on Gauda hardware platform 20-100X acceleration when running solely traditional CPUs
Remcom XFdtd 3D EM modeling and simulation Ultra-fast FDTD numerical computations -- up to 500 times faster than a modern 64-bit CPU
Rocketick RocketSim Verilog simulation Solves functional verification bottlenecks by complementing simulators with a GPU-based acceleration solution that offers 10x faster simulations for highly complex designs
SPEAG SEMCAD-X 3D EM modeling and simulation Solving large-scale, high-resolution problems in CPU-based software becomes too burdensome to be practical

Other Relevant Software Using CUDA

Technical Reports on EDA on CUDA

Solvers and Core Kernels for EDA on CUDA GPUs

See Also

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