A vector hardware accelerator with circuit simulation emphasis
Andrei Vladimirescu, Don Weiss, Manolis G. H. Katevenis, Zvika Bronstein, A. Kifir, K. Danuwidjaja, K. C. Ng., N. Jain, Stanley E. Lass · 1987
A floating-point vector accelerator has been built which runs circuit simulation efficiently. The design considerations of the accelerator are based on the time-consuming parts of SPICE2, available off-the-shelf parts, advanced software tools experience and cost/performance. The three board accelerator can run the entire application program complied from a high-level language. A personal workstation, such as the PC-AT, is used for the general I/O tasks such as file handling and network support. The processor has a Single-Instruction Multiple-Data 64-bit floating-point pipelined architecture. It can achieve a maximum speed of 8 Mips and 8 MFlops. A floating-point processor based on two functional units, a multiplier and an ALU, and an integer processor work in parallel to achieve the high performance. The accelerator attached to a PC-AT runs SPICE2 60 times faster than the personal workstation alone and achieves double the performance of a VAX 8650.