A Simple Relaxation based Circuit Simulator for VLSI Circuits with Emerging Devices

This paper presents a circuit simulator based on look-up table approach for simulation of VLSI digital circuits with emerging devices which currently cannot be simulated with existing commercial simulators. We have used a point relaxation based circuit simulator which is suitable for digital circuits. To validate our circuit simulator, we have simulated standard circuits with MOS devices of SPICE level 49 for 0.18 micron technology and results are in very good agreement with a commercial simulator. Further, we have successfully simulated standard circuits with an emerging device, FinFET inverter, chain of FinFET inverters, 31stage ring oscillator of FinFET inverters and read-write operations for FinFET 6-T SRAM cell. Our results match with that of the device simulator. Finally, we have been able to simulate digital circuits with approximately 1.6 million FinFETs (512 × 512 SRAM memory array) using less than 1.7GB working memory (Pentium-4, 3.0GHz).