High-Performance Diagnostic Fault Simulation on GPUs

In this paper, we present an efficient diagnostic fault simulator based on a state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU). Diagnostic fault simulation plays an important role to identify and locate the causes of circuit failures. However, today´s complex VLSI circuits pose ever higher computational demand for such simulators. Our GPU based diagnostic fault simulator (GDSim) is based on a novel two-stage simulation framework which exploits high computation efficiency on the GPU. The fault pair based simulation is proposed to overcome the limited capacity of GPU memory as well as achieve a substantial fine-grained parallelism. Multi-fault-signature and dynamic load balancing techniques are introduced for the best usage of computing resources on-board. Experimental results demonstrate a speedup of up to 121× (with average speedup of 38.43×) compared to a state-of-the-art CPU-based diagnostic fault simulator.