2011 GPU-based parallelization for fast circuit optimization

The progress of GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) technology opens a new avenue for boosting computing power. This work is an at-tempt to exploit GPU for accelerating VLSI circuit optimization. We propose GPU-based parallel computing techniques and apply them on simultaneous gate sizing and threshold voltage assign-ment, which is often employed in practice for performance and power optimization. These techniques are aimed to fully utilize the benefits of GPU through efficient task scheduling and memory or-ganization. Compared to conventional sequential computation, our techniques can provide up to 56 × speedup without any sacrifice on solution quality