PiSPICE: Accelerating Post-Layout SPICE Simulation via Essential Parasitic Identification

As process nodes scale to more advanced technologies, post-layout simulations for integrated circuits have become increasingly complex, involving billions to trillions of nodes. The growing design complexity and transistor integration require more accurate and efficient post-layout SPICE simulations. However, existing methods for solving large-scale post-layout circuits face significant challenges due to high computational costs. In this paper, we propose a new approach, PiSPICE, which utilizes adjoint sensitivity analysis to identify critical parasitics and eliminate non-critical ones, effectively reducing the simulation scale and improving speed. By modeling parasitics and performing sensitivity analysis on pre-layout circuits, we significantly reduce the computational burden and avoid the overhead of directly analyzing sensitivities in large-scale postlayout circuits. By retaining only the critical parasitics and applying model order reduction to minimize their impact, while eliminating non-critical parasitics, PiSPICE achieves a speedup of up to 17.27 x in simulation with an error margin of less than 0.78% compared to the commercial simulator Spectre.