GPSCP: A general-purpose support-circuit preconditioning approach to large-scale SPICE-accurate nonlinear circuit simulations

Xueqian Zhao, Zhuo Feng

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

To improve the efficiency of direct solution methods in SPICE-accurate nonlinear circuit simulations, preconditioned iterative solution techniques have been widely studied in the past decades. However, it still has been an extremely challenging task to develop general-purpose preconditioning methods that can deal with various large-scale nonlinear circuit simulations. In this work, a novel circuit-oriented, generalpurpose support-circuit preconditioning technique (GPSCP) is proposed to significantly improve the matrix solving time and reduce the memory consumption during large-scale nonlinear circuit simulations. We show that by decomposing the system Jacobian matrix at a given solution point into a graph Laplacian matrix as well as a matrix including all voltage and controlled sources, and subsequently sparsifying the graph Laplacian matrix based on support graph theory, the general-purpose support-circuit preconditioning matrix can be efficiently obtained, thereby serving as a very effective and efficient preconditioner in solving the original Jacobian matrix through Krylov-subspace iterations. Additionally, a novel critical node selection method and an energy-based spanning-graph scaling method have been proposed to further improve the quality of ultra-sparsifier support graph. To gain higher computational efficiency during transient circuit analysis, a dynamic support-circuit preconditioner updating approach has also been investigated. Our experimental results for a variety of large-scale nonlinear circuit designs show that the proposed technique can achieve up to 14.0X runtime speedups and 6.7X memory reduction in DC and transient simulations.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6386703
Pages (from-to)429-435
Number of pages7
JournalIEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, Digest of Technical Papers, ICCAD
StatePublished - 2012
Event2012 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD 2012 - San Jose, CA, United States
Duration: 5 Nov 20128 Nov 2012

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