Parallel Transient Simulation of Multiphysics Circuits Using Delay-Based Partitioning
A parallel transient simulation technique for multiphysics circuits is presented. The technique develops partitions utilizing the inherent delay present within a circuit and between physical domains. A state-variable-based circuit delay element is presented, which implements the coupling between two spatially or temporally isolated circuit partitions. A parallel delay-based iterative approach for interfacing delay-partitioned subcircuits is applied, which achieves the reasonable accuracy of nonparallel circuit simulation if both incorporate the same interblock delay. The partitioned subcircuits are distributed to different cores of a shared-memory multicore processor and solved in parallel. A multithreaded implementation of the methodology using OpenMP is presented. Examples showing superlinear speedup compared to unpartitioned single-core simulation using the direct method are presented. This paper also discusses the impact of load balancing and absolute delay on simulation speedup.
parallelization transient simulation multiphysics delay element multicore electrothermal simulation parallel simulation