Abstract
Two major trends in the VLSI chip design industry are the increase in system complexity and the increasing importance of short design times. The rise in chip complexity is motivated by consumer demand for higher performance products as well as increases in integration density which allow more functionality to be placed on a single chip. A consequence of this rise in complexity is an increasingly apparent chip validation bottleneck. Validation is a simulation intensive task and simulation time scales as the square of the increase in system complexity [9, 7]. Currently, complex VLSI chips take millions of hours of simulation to verify. Short design times are important because once a chip has been conceived there is a limited time window in which to bring the chip to market so that it will have competitive performance. For a new chip or system to be competitive when it reaches the marketplace, its performance must match the performance growth of the rest of the industry. This means that a complex chip that takes too long to design might miss its market window and by the time it reaches the market its performance will be uncompetitive. To reduce design time, system design bottlenecks need to be removed. System emulation and prototyping technology can play an important role in relieving the simulation bottleneck and managing system complexity.
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Helaihel, R., Olukotun, K. (1996). Emulation and Prototyping Of Digital Systems. In: De Micheli, G., Sami, M. (eds) Hardware/Software Co-Design. NATO ASI Series, vol 310. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0187-2_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0187-2_14
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