Hardware acceleration of logic simulation using a data flow microarchitecture

Abstract

Current digital logic simulators running on engineering workstations lack capacity and speed. This paper discusses a hardware accelerator for a workstation simulator which addresses these problems. The accelerator runs 100x faster than its software counterpart and can simulate up to 1 million gates. The accelerator has been built and is being sold commercially. The architecture of the accelerator is similar to that of a classical dataflow machine. We describe the architecture of the machine and illustrate how it would simulate a simple circuit. We then briefly discuss the relationship between event driven simulation and dataflow.