Modern day chips are increasingly complex with stringent quality requirements, very demanding performance requirement and very low power consumption requirement. Verification of these chips is very time consuming and accounts for approximately 70% of the simulation workload on EDA server farms. As software-based simulators… Read More
At a superficial level, emulation in the hardware design world is just a way to run a simulation faster. The design to be tested runs on the emulator, connected to whatever test mechanisms you desire, and the whole setup can run many orders of magnitude faster than it could if the design was running inside a software simulator. And … Read More
The defining characteristic of In-Circuit-Emulation (ICE) has been that the emulator is connected to real circuitry – a storage device perhaps, and PCIe or Ethernet interfaces. The advantage is that you can test your emulated model against real traffic and responses, rather than an interface model which may not fully capture… Read More
In the world of hardware emulators, virtualization is a hot and sometimes contentious topic. It’s hot because emulators are expensive, creating a lot of pressure to maximize return on that investment through multi-user sharing and 24×7 operation. And of course in this cloud-centric world it doesn’t hurt to promote cloud-like… Read More
Mentor hosted a panel on emulation in their booth at DAC this year. One thing I really liked about this panel is that it didn’t include anyone from Mentor. Not that I have anything against Mentor employees, who are a fine bunch of people from those I know, but I find panels most interesting when the discussion is purely among customers.… Read More
Software-centric Emulation environment takes the forefront in modern SoC verification. As more and more devices are IoT enabled, the SoCs have to make special provisions to factor many things including communication, power usage, and network switching, and so on. Also, the demand for an SoC (specifically for smartphone which… Read More
As the number of CPU, GPU, and IP is growing in an SoC, power management is becoming more and more a complex task in itself. A single tool or methodology may not be enough for complete power management and verification of an SoC. In an SoC, there can be multiple modes of operations involving hardware and software interactions, different… Read More
