A vector hardware accelerator with circuit simulation emphasis

ABSTRACT

A floating-point vector accelerator has been built which runs circuit simulation efficiently. The design considerations of the accelerator are based on the time-consuming parts of SPICE2, available off-the-shelf parts, advanced software tools experience and cost/performance. The three board accelerator can run the entire application program compiled from a high-level language. A personal workstation, such as the PC-AT, is used for the general I/O tasks such as file handling and network support. The processor has a Single-Instruction Multiple-Data 64-bit floating-point pipelined architecture. It can achieve a maximum speed of 8 Mips and 8 MFlops. A floating-point processor based on two functional units, a multiplier and an ALU, and an integer processor work in parallel to achieve the high performance. The accelerator attached to a PC-AT runs SPICE2 60 times faster than the personal workstation alone and achieves double the performance of a VAX 8650.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES
      C.1.2 Multiple Data Stream Architectures (Multiprocessors)
          Subjects: Single-instruction-stream, multiple-data-stream processors (SIMD)

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
      B.7.2 Design Aids
          Subjects: Simulation

  C. Computer Systems Organization

General Terms:
Design, Measurement, Performance