The switch-level model represents a digital metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) circuit as a network of charge storage nodes connected by resistive transistor switches. The functionality of such a network can be expressed as a series of systems of Boolean equations. Solving these equations symbolically yields a set of Boolean formulas that describe the mapping from input and current state to the new network state. This analysis supports the same class of networks as the switch-level simulator MOSSIM II and provides the same functionality, including the handling of bidirectional e ects and indeterminate (X) logic values. In the worst case, the analysis of an n node network can yield a set of formulas containing a total of O(n 3) operations. However, all but a limited set of dense, pass-transistor networks give formulas with O(n) total operations. The analysis can serve as the basis of e cient programs for a variety oflogic design tasks, including: logic simulation (on both conventional and special purpose computers), fault simulation, test generation, and symbolic veri cation.

The cosmos simulator provides fast and accurate switch-level modeling of mos digital circuits. It attains high performance by preprocessing the transistor network into a functionally equivalent Boolean representation. This description, produced by the symbolic analyzer anamos, captures all aspects of switch-level networks including bidirectional transistors, stored charge, different signal strengths, and indeterminate (X) logic values. The lgcc program translates the Boolean representation into a set of machine language evaluation procedures and initialized data structures. These procedures and data structures are compiled along with code implementing the simulation kernel and user interface to produce the simulation program. The simulation program runs an order of magnitude faster than our previous simulator mossim ii.

A network of switches controlled by Boolean variables can be represented as a system of Boolean equations. The solution of this system gives a symbolic description of the conducting paths in the network. Gaussian elimination provides an efficient technique for solving sparse systems of Boolean equations. For the class of networks that arise when analyzing digital metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) circuits, a simple pivot selection rule guarantees that most s switch networks encountered in practice can be solved with O(s) operations. When represented by a directed acyclic graph, the set of Boolean formulas generated by the analysis has total size bounded by the number of operations required by the Gaussian elimination. This paper presents the mathematical basis for systems of Boolean equations, their solution by Gaussian elimination, and data structures and algorithms for representing and manipulating Boolean formulas.

We introduce a new method of verifying the timing of custom CMOS circuits. Due to the exponential number of patterns required, traditional simulation methods are unable to exhaustively verify a medium-sized modern logic block. Static analysis can handle much larger circuits but is not robust with respect to variations from standard circuit structures. Our approach applies symbolic simulation to analyze a circuit over all input combinations without these limitations. We present a prototype simulator (SirSim) and experimental results. We also discuss using SirSim to verify an industrial design which previously required a specialpurpose verification methodology.

We recently introduced symbolic timing simulation (STS) using data-dependent delays as a tool for verifying the timing of fullcustom transistor-level circuit designs, and for the functional verification of delay-dependent logic. While STS leverages efficient symbolic encodings to yield huge gains over conventional simulation methodologies, it still suffers from a problem known as event multiplication. We discuss this problem and present an event-list management technique based on event-clusters, and a new simulator which utilizes this technique. Finally, we demonstrate substantial speedups on a wide range of test cases, including exponential improvement on a simple logic chain.