Accelerating Transistor-Level Simulation of Integrated Circuits via Equivalence of RC Long-Chain Structures

Transistor-level simulation plays a vital role in validating the physical correctness of integrated circuits. However, such simulations are computationally expensive. This paper proposes three novel reduction methods specifically tailored to RC long-chain structures with different scales of time constant. Such structures account for an average of 6.34% (up to 12%) of the total nodes in the benchmark circuits. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods yields an average performance improvement of 8.8% (up to 22%) on simulating benchmark circuits which include a variety of functional modules such as ALUs, adders, multipliers, SEC/DED checkers, and interrupt controllers, with only 0.7% relative error.