Transient-simulation guided graph sparsification approach to scalable harmonic balance (HB) analysis of post-layout RF circuits leveraging heterogeneous CPU-GPU computing systems
Lengfei Han, Zhuo Feng · 2015
Harmonic Balance (HB) analysis is key to efficient verification of large post-layout RF and microwave integrated circuits (ICs). This paper introduces a novel transient-simulation guided graph sparsification technique, as well as an efficient runtime performance modeling approach tailored for heterogeneous manycore CPU-GPU computing system to build nearly-optimal subgraph preconditioners that can lead to minimum HB simulation runtime. Additionally, we propose a novel heterogeneous parallel sparse block matrix algorithm by taking advantages of the structure of HB Jacobian matrices as well as GPU's streaming multiprocessors to achieve optimal work load balancing during the preconditioning phase of HB analysis. We also show how the proposed preconditioned iterative algorithm can efficiently adapt to heterogeneous computing systems with different CPU and GPU computing capabilities. Extensive experimental results show that our HB solver can achieve up to 20X speedups and 5X memory reduction when compared with the state-of-the-art direct solver highly optimized for eight-core CPUs.