Relaxation Techniques for the Simulation of VLSI Circuits

Circuit simulation has been a topic of great interest to the integrated circuit design community for many years. It is a difficult, and interesting, problem be- cause circuit simulators are very heavily used, consuming thousands of computer hours every year, and therefore the algorithms must be very efficient. In addi- tion, circuit simulators are heavily relied upon, with millions of dollars being gambled on their accuracy, and therefore the algorithms must be very robust. At the University of California, Berkeley, a great deal of research has been devoted to the study of both the numerical properties and the efficient imple- mentation of circuit simulation algorithms. Research efforts have led to several programs, starting with CANCER in the 1960s and the enormously successful SPICE program in the early 1970s, to MOTIS-C, SPLICE, and RELAX in the late 1970s, and finally to SPLICE2 and RELAX2 in the 1980s. Our primary goal in writing this book was to present some of the results of our current research on the application of relaxation algorithms to circuit simu- lation. As we began, we realized that a large body of mathematical and exper- imental results had been amassed over the past twenty years by graduate students, professors, and industry researchers working on circuit simulation. It became a secondary goal to try to find an organization of this mass of material that was mathematically rigorous, had practical relevance, and still retained the natural intuitive simplicity of the circuit simulation subject.