A novel approach for digital waveform compression [IC simulation data]

The waveform data, which is gathered during digital simulation of large and complex systems, easily fills up huge amounts of disk space on the simulation computer. This is specially true for many deep-submicron designs. Hence, we developed a set of algorithms and techniques which can be used to efficiently compress digital waveforms without losing any significant information from the original data. Experimental results show that compression ratios of up to 300, compared to an original VCD formatted file, can be achieved.