Abstract:

An effective method is proposed to perform static and transient simulations for the large-scale power and ground network circuits with a good result obtained. This method compresses the large coefficient matrix by only storing the non-zero elements with the column coordinate index which avoids the row coordinate index and eases the burden of memory usage. Then it uses the BiCGStab algorithm to analyze the large network which avoids the inverse matrix computing. Extensive experimental results on the large-scale power and ground network show that the presented method is over two orders of magnitude faster than HSPICE in transient simulations. Furthermore, our method reduces over 95％ memory usage than HSPICE and 75％ memory usage than Incomplete Cholesky Conjugate Gradient while the accuracy is not compromised. The presented method has more powerful capability to deal with the increasing size of power grids in modern microprocessors than general-purpose circuit simulators with significant memory and run-time advantages.

Key words: power and ground networks, circuit simulations, BiCGStab algorithm