Efficient Digital Waveform Compression Method for Logic Simulation of Integrated Circuits

: Circuit simulation becomes more and more important in integrated circuit design. For VLSI circuits, the simulation usually outputs signal waveforms occupying massive storage space. The compression of these signal waveforms becomes crucial to the efficiency of circuit simulation. Logic simulation mainly outputs the signal values at the time of signal transition and some auxiliary information such as signal name, signal type, signal width. A compression method for auxiliary information is proposed. Then, the signal name compression scheme in existing work is improved according to the characteristics of signal value data, and a more efficient digital waveform compression storage format is proposed. The proposed format is more adaptive to the variable-length coding for compression. At the same time, general compression algorithms can be used for secondary compression, thereby further