ACCELERATORS BREAK BOTTLENECKS IN LOGIC AND FAULT SIMULATION.

Software acceleration takes two complementary approaches: the use of highly efficient algorithms and any parallelism inherent in the simulation problem. Hardware solutions, on the other hand, are applied to accelerate every part of the design cycle or only a portion of it, such as logic simulation, fault simulation or physical layout. These hardware solutions are often referred to as global and point acceleration. This article discusses the methods and the techniques of global accelerators that boost the processing power of the design system by adding a floating-point processor, a parallel or pipelined processor, or a mainframe-like supercomputer. Point accelerators that use microcoded or hard-wired algorithms to perform specific design tasks are also discussed.