Switch Level Time Simulation of CMOS Circuits with Adaptive Voltage and Frequency Scaling

Abstract

Design and test validation of systems with adaptive voltage-and frequency scaling (AVFS) requires timing simulation with accurate timing models under multiple operating points. Such models are usually located at logic level and compromise accuracy and simulation speed due to the runtime complexity.This paper presents the first massively parallel time simulator at switch level that uses parametric delay modeling for efficient timing-accurate validation of systems with AVFS. It provides full glitch-accurate switching activity information of designs under varying supply voltage and temperature. Offline statistical learning with regression analysis is employed to generate polynomials for dynamic delay modeling by approximation of the first-order electrical parameters of CMOS standard cells. With the parallelization on graphics processing units and simultaneous exploitation of multiple dimensions of parallelism the simulation throughput is maximized and scalable-design space exploration of AVFS-based systems is enabled. Results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency with speedups of up to 159× over conventional logic level time simulation with static delays.