On the Use of GP-GPUs for Accelerating Compute-intensive EDA Applications

General purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) have recently been explored as a new computing paradigm for accelerating compute-intensive EDA applications. Such massively parallel architectures have been applied in accelerating the simulation of digital designs during several phases of their development – corresponding to different abstraction levels, specifically: (i) gate-level netlist descriptions, (ii) register-transfer level and (iii) transaction-level descriptions. This embedded tutorial presents a comprehensive analysis of the best results obtained by adopting GP-GPUs in all these EDA applications.