Fourth Asian Test Symposium (ATS'95)
Hardware-accelerated concurrent fault simulation: eventflow computing versus dataflow computing
Bangalore, India
November 23-November 24
ISBN: 0-8186-7129-7
W. Hahn, Fac. of Math. & Comput. Sci., Passau Univ., Germany
A. Hagerer, Fac. of Math. & Comput. Sci., Passau Univ., Germany
MuSiC, the highly-parallel Munich Simulation Computer, represents an approach for hardware-accelerated logic simulation by applying concepts developed for dataflow architectures to high-speed simulation of digital systems. This approach exploiting parallelism inherent in a design is most efficient. In comparison to two different dataflow computation schemes and their hardware-accelerated implementations, this paper shows that the strategy of compiler-driven simulation can be combined with the concept of event-(activity)-directed simulation (selective trace simulation) not only for logic simulation but also for concurrent fault simulation. Experiments indicate that there is a performance advantage of eventflow computing over the algorithmically simpler dataflow computing schemes but the advantage is limited, since dataflow computing performance of a MuSiC version with 256 Processing Units already is in the range of 10/sup 7/ to 10/sup 8/ test-vectors times gates evaluated per second.
Index Terms:
concurrent engineering; fault diagnosis; logic testing; discrete event simulation; circuit analysis computing; data flow computing; VLSI; automatic testing; integrated circuit testing; hardware-accelerated concurrent fault simulation; eventflow computing; dataflow computing; MuSiC; highly-parallel Munich Simulation Computer; logic simulation; compiler-driven simulation; selective trace simulation; test vectors; VLSI; automatic testing
Citation:
W. Hahn, A. Hagerer, R. Kandlbinder, "Hardware-accelerated concurrent fault simulation: eventflow computing versus dataflow computing," ats, pp.107, Fourth Asian Test Symposium (ATS'95), 1995