A floating-point vector accelerator has been built which runs circuit simulation efficiently. The design considerations of the accelerator are based on the time-consuming parts of SPICE2, available off-the-shelf parts, advanced software tools experience and cost/performance.  The three board accelerator can run the entire application program compiled from a high-level language. A personal workstation, such as the PC-AT, is used for the general I/O tasks such as file handling and network support.  The processor has a Single-Instruction Multiple-Data 64-bit floating-point pipelined architecture. It can achieve a maximum speed of 8 Mips and 8 MFlops. A floating-point processor based on two functional units, a multiplier and an ALU, and an integer processor work in parallel to achieve the high performance.  The accelerator attached to a PC-AT runs SPICE2 60 times faster than the personal workstation alone and achieves double the performance of a VAX 8650.
['A. Vladimirescu', 'David Weiss', 'Manolis Katevenis', 'Zvika Bronstein', 'Alon Kifir', 'Karja Danuwidjaja', 'Kam Chuen Ng', 'Niraj Jain', 'Steve Lass']
A Vector Hardware Accelerator with Circuit Simulation Emphasis