Circuit Simulation on a Hypercube

This paper discusses combined research on circuit simulation and parallel processing. Fast simulation of VLSI circuits is economically important in IC design. Hypercubes, by virtue of their scalability to thousands of processors have enough power to do the job. Hypercubes and an associated programming environment (called protocols) were constructed in the authors' laboratory to support experiments in circuit simulation. Synchronous and asynchronous approaches were programmed and compared, and the results are discussed here.