A Hardware Architecture for Switch-Level Simulation

The Mossim Simulation Engine (MSE) is a hardware accelerator for performing switch-level simulation of MOS VLSI circuits [1], [2]. Functional partitioning of the MOSSIM algorithm and specialized circuitry are used by the MSE to achieve a performance improvement of > 300 over a VAX 11/780 executing the MOSSIM II program. Several MSE processors can be connected in parallel to achieve additional speedup. A virtual processor mechanism allows the MSE to simulate large circuits with the size of the circuit limited only by the amount of backing store available to hold the circuit description.