Fast Transient Simulation of Power Distribution Networks Containing Dispersion Based on Parallel-Distributed Leapfrog Algorithm

Takayuki WATANABE
Yuichi TANJI
Hidemasa KUBOTA
Hideki ASAI

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E90-A    No.2    pp.388-397
Publication Date: 2007/02/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1093/ietfec/e90-a.2.388
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Analog Circuit Techniques and Related Topics)
Category: 
Keyword: 
circuit simulation,  power integrity,  leapfrog algorithm,  frequency-dependent dispersion,  parallel computation,  

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Summary: 
This paper presents a fast transient simulation method for power distribution networks (PDNs) of the PCB/Package. Because these PDNs are modeled as large-scale linear circuits consisting of a large number of RLC elements, it takes large costs to solve by conventional circuit simulators, such as SPICE. Our simulation method is based on the leapfrog algorithm, and can solve RLC circuits of PDNs faster than SPICE. Actual PDNs have frequency-dependent dispersions such as the skin-effect of conductors and the dielectric loss. To model these dispersions, more number of RLC elements are required, and circuit structures of these dispersion models are hard to solve by using the leapfrog algorithm. This paper shows that the circuit structures of dispersion models can be converted to suitable structures for the leapfrog algorithm. Further, in order to reduce the simulation time, our proposed method exploits parallel computation techniques. Numerical results show that our proposed method using single processing element (PE) enables a speedup of 20-100 times and 10 times compared to HSPICE and INDUCTWISE with the same level of accuracy, respectively. In a large-scale example with frequency-dependent dispersions, our method achieves over 94% parallel efficiency with 5PEs.

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