A Survey of Hardware Accelerators Used in Computer-Aided Design

Simulating logic circuits: A multiprocessor application

“…As a consequence of the decision to use Multilisp, CONSIM attains only about 300 gate evaluations per second, a factor of 3 shy of the 10 3 cited in Ref. 18 as typical for software logic simulators (compare to the 108 cited for hardware accelerators). CONSIM was not built to win a race, on an absolute scale, with other simulators.…”

“…(12) Special-purpose simulation engines are surveyed in Ref. 18. Hardware accelerators tend to restrict the range of primitive circuit elements that can be simulated directly, but can simulate circuit elements conforming to the chosen stereotypes with great speed.…”

Hardware resource utilization optimization in FPGA-based Heterogeneous MPSoC architectures

“…The integration of custom instruction in FPGA-based MPSoC increases the performance gain by incorporating hardware components to handle computational tasks [6][7][8][9]. Modern platforms, including FPGAs and ASICs support different couplings of hardware components with the processor.…”

Sahara: Massively parallel dedicated hardware for cycle-based logic simulations

“…Logic-simulation techniques used in previous examples of dedicated simulation hardware [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] can be divided into two general methods: the level-sort and compile approach and the event approach. Also, regardless of the hardware, these all use custom processors to execute the algorithms in parallel.…”

“…Since the late 1980s, the focus of most development aimed at scaling up and speeding up logic simulations has been multiprocessor hardware customized for running simulations [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. In the 1990s, advances in logic synthesis technology, high-level design-description languages, and logic emulation using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) all contributed to faster development, but these were mostly only used by specialist manufacturers.…”