From Layout Directly to Simulation: A First-Principle-Guided Circuit Simulator of Linear Complexity and Its Efficient Parallelization

In this paper, guided by electromagnetics-based first principles, the authors develop a transient simulator that allows for the simulation of an integrated circuit including both nonlinear devices and the layout of the linear network in linear complexity. The proposed circuit simulator rigorously captures the coupling between nonlinear circuits and the linear network. In addition, it bypasses the step of circuit extraction, producing a resistor-inductor-capacitor representation of the linear network without any numerical computation. Moreover, it permits an almost embarrassingly parallel implementation on a many-core computing platform, and hence enabling linear speedup. Application to die-package co-simulation as well as very large-scale on-chip circuits involving over 800 000 complementary metal-oxide semiconductor transistors and interconnects having hundreds of millions of unknowns has demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed first-principle-guided circuit simulator.