2008 R&D 100 Winner
The pace of integrated circuit manufacturing has left IC design in the dust. Traditional digital simulators are inadequate and no longer used, and analog circuit simulation methods, such as SPICE, are serial-only and rely on direct matrix solvers. Their limit is 100,000 unknowns while today’s circuitry can feature millions of transistors (and thus millions of unknowns).
The world’s first massively parallel analog circuit simulator, the Xyce 4.0.2, invented by Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, N.M., is intended to re-invigorate IC design with a modular, object-oriented C++ approach using pre-conditioned iterative linear solvers. Developed beginning in 1999 with the intention of helping to certify large electrical systems in the presence of radiation and other hostile effects, Xyce was deemed necessary for the science-based stewardship of nuclear weapons stockpiles. Now, it stands to benefit feature size in IC design.
Those familiar with SPICE will recognize the basic set of Kirchoff law equations used in Xyce. However, the complete code redesign is parallel in the most general sense, relying on a message-passing implementation that allows it to run efficiently on the largest possible number of computing platforms. As early as 2003, Xyce solved a 14,336,000-device circuit problem using 1,024 processors. Xyce will be part of a commercial electronic design automation product in the coming year and Fastrack Design Inc., San Jose, Calif., has licensed the technology.
Technology
Parallel analog circuit simulator
Developer
Sandia National Laboratories
