Fact-checked by Grok 2 weeks ago

Hardware emulation

Hardware emulation is a verification technique in integrated circuit (IC) design that replicates the behavior of a target hardware system—typically a system-on-chip (SoC) or application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)—using reconfigurable hardware platforms, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), to enable functional testing, debugging, and validation at near-real-time speeds.^[1]^[2] This process involves compiling the design's hardware description language (HDL) code, such as Verilog or VHDL, into a format executable on the emulator, which then mimics the target system's logic, timing, and interactions with external components.^[1]^[3] Unlike software simulation, hardware emulation provides greater visibility into internal states and supports co-verification with embedded software, making it essential for complex designs exceeding millions of gates.^[1]^[2] The origins of hardware emulation trace back to the mid-1980s, when it was developed to address the slowdowns in software simulation as semiconductor designs grew in complexity, with early systems relying on custom logic arrays and fixed interconnects for acceleration.^[4]^[5] Commercialization accelerated in the late 1990s, with Quickturn Design Systems introducing the CoBALT (Concurrent Broadcast Array Logic Technology) emulator in 1997, followed by acquisitions like Cadence's purchase of Quickturn in 1998, which led to multi-generational platforms such as Palladium.^[6]^[7] By the 2000s, emulation entered mainstream verification flows, evolving to incorporate programmable interconnects, higher capacities (up to billions of gate equivalents), and integration with electronic design automation (EDA) tools from vendors like Synopsys and Mentor Graphics.^[8]^[2] In practice, hardware emulation is applied across key stages of IC development, including system-level functional verification, IP core validation, and early software-hardware co-development, allowing teams to run billions of test cycles and interact with real peripherals via in-circuit emulation setups.^[1]^[3] It excels in scenarios requiring high-speed execution—typically 1–10 MHz—compared to simulation's hertz-level performance, while offering enhanced debug capabilities through trace buffers and multi-language support (e.g., C, SystemC).^[1]^[2]^[9] Despite higher upfront costs (often in the millions of dollars) and setup times of weeks, its per-gate economics have improved dramatically, driving adoption in industries like automotive, aerospace, and consumer electronics for handling designs too large for pure simulation.^[1]^[8] Current trends as of 2025 emphasize hybrid emulation-simulation environments and FPGA-based scalability to meet the demands of AI accelerators and 5G systems, with the hardware-assisted verification market projected to reach over $3 billion by 2035.^[10]^[2]^[11]^[12]

Fundamentals

Definition and Principles

Hardware emulation refers to the use of reconfigurable hardware platforms, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) or custom processors, to replicate the functionality and behavior of a target digital system at speeds approaching real-time operation.^[2] This approach accelerates the verification process in electronic design automation (EDA) by executing the design on specialized hardware rather than purely in software.^[1] In the context of very-large-scale integration (VLSI), application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and FPGAs, hardware emulation targets the pre-silicon validation of complex digital circuits, distinguishing it from general computing emulation, such as software-based replication of legacy central processing units (CPUs) for running old applications.^[2] Unlike CPU emulation, which often prioritizes compatibility for software execution on modern hosts, EDA-focused hardware emulation emphasizes cycle-by-cycle behavioral fidelity to detect design flaws in hardware descriptions like register-transfer level (RTL) code.^[13] The core principles of hardware emulation involve mapping the RTL description of the target design onto the emulator's reconfigurable resources, managing multiple clock domains to synchronize operations, and interfacing signals between the emulator and external environments, such as testbenches or target systems.^[14] Emulation can operate in cycle-accurate mode, where each clock cycle of the design is precisely replicated to ensure bit-level accuracy, or in transaction-level mode, which abstracts lower-level details to model high-level communications for faster execution during software co-verification.^[1] Clock domain handling typically involves retiming signals across domains to prevent timing violations, while signal interfacing uses protocols like PCI Express or custom I/O to connect the emulator seamlessly.^[2] The basic workflow begins with compilation, where the RTL code is synthesized into a netlist of logic gates and flip-flops, followed by partitioning the netlist across the emulator's hardware elements to balance load and optimize routing.^[14] This partitioned netlist is then mapped to the physical resources of FPGAs or processors, including place-and-route for FPGAs to achieve timing closure, enabling execution where the emulator runs the design under stimuli to observe outputs and debug issues.^[15]

Historical Development

Hardware emulation emerged in the late 1980s as a response to the limitations of software-based logic simulation in verifying increasingly complex VLSI designs, with early systems leveraging custom programmable logic arrays to achieve gate-level emulation speeds orders of magnitude faster than simulation.^[4] Zycad, founded in 1981, became a pioneer by developing hardware accelerators based on custom ASICs and interface control processors, culminating in its XP series launched in the late 1980s, such as the XP-100 capable of emulating 256,000 gates at up to 2.5 million events per second.^[16] Contemporaneous efforts by Ikos Systems and Quickturn Design Systems in the mid-1980s introduced the first generation of in-circuit emulation platforms using programmable logic to integrate designs into target systems for real-world testing.^[17] The 1990s marked significant advancements in scalability and usability, driven by the need for ASIC verification amid rising design complexities, with Quickturn leading through its RPM (Rapid Prototype Machine) in 1990 and the System Realizer launched in 1994, which utilized Xilinx XC4013 FPGAs to support up to 2.2 million gates at 8 MHz clock speeds.^[4] These systems addressed early challenges like lengthy compilation times—often months—and poor debug visibility, enabling broader adoption in industry for pre-silicon validation.^[7] By the decade's end, mergers such as Mentor's acquisition of Meta Systems in 1996 introduced custom FPGA architectures that improved design partitioning and power efficiency, setting the stage for more accessible emulation tools.^[8] Around 2000, the field transitioned from custom ASICs to commercial FPGA platforms, revitalized by advances in devices like Xilinx Virtex series, which offered higher capacities and faster reconfiguration, reducing setup times from months to days and enabling multi-FPGA scaling.^[7] This shift aligned with Moore's Law, which doubled transistor densities approximately every two years, exponentially increasing design sizes and necessitating emulator capacities that grew over 10-fold by the mid-2000s to handle 100 million gates across multi-chassis systems.^[8] In 2002, Mentor Graphics released the VStation emulator, leveraging these FPGAs for enhanced visibility and speed in software co-verification.^[8] The modern era, post-2010, integrated high-level synthesis for faster design compilation and advanced multi-FPGA interconnects for billion-gate scales, exemplified by Cadence's Palladium Z1 platform introduced in 2015, which combined processor-based emulation with datacenter-class scalability for system-level verification.^[8] Synopsys advanced FPGA-based emulation with its ZeBu Server, enhanced after acquiring EVE in 2012 and continuing development through 2015 with up to 3x faster compile times and unified debugging integration.^[18] These innovations sustained emulation's role in handling Moore's Law-driven complexity, supporting applications from OS boot-up to hardware-software integration at speeds approaching 1 MHz.^[7]

Technical Foundations

Emulation vs. Simulation

Hardware emulation and software-based simulation represent two primary methodologies for verifying digital designs, differing fundamentally in their implementation and execution. Simulation employs software models, typically written in hardware description languages such as Verilog or VHDL, to predict the behavioral response of a design to input stimuli; tools like ModelSim process these models on general-purpose processors to mimic circuit operation at various abstraction levels, from behavioral to gate-level. In contrast, emulation maps the design onto specialized hardware platforms, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) or custom processor arrays, to execute the design directly in hardware, providing a more physical replication of the target system's dynamics.^[2] This hardware deployment enables emulation to achieve execution speeds orders of magnitude higher than simulation, as it leverages parallel processing inherent to the reconfigurable logic rather than sequential software interpretation.^[19] Performance disparities between the two approaches are stark, particularly for large-scale designs. Software simulation typically operates at speeds ranging from tens of hertz to a few kilohertz for complex systems-on-chip (SoCs), limited by the computational overhead of event scheduling and state updates on single-threaded or modestly parallelized CPUs.^[20] For instance, simulating a billion clock cycles in a large design might require days of runtime in a simulator due to these bottlenecks.^[21] Emulation, however, runs at kilohertz to megahertz frequencies, exploiting the inherent parallelism of the emulating hardware to process the same billion cycles in mere hours, offering speedups of 10 to 10,000 times or more depending on design size and platform.^[22]^[20] These metrics underscore emulation's suitability for regression testing and long-duration workloads, where simulation becomes impractical. Regarding accuracy, both techniques can achieve cycle-accurate verification, faithfully reproducing the design's state transitions and outputs per clock cycle when configured appropriately.^[20] Simulation excels in providing detailed visibility into internal signals and timing, supporting four-state logic (0, 1, X, Z) for detecting uninitialized conditions, though two-state modes are often used for faster execution at the cost of some precision.^[20] Emulation maintains similar cycle accuracy through compiled hardware mappings but may introduce minor discrepancies in propagation delays due to the emulating fabric's routing, though these are typically negligible for functional validation.^[23] Emulation's advantage lies in scaling to larger designs—often exceeding 1 billion gates—via massive parallelism, whereas simulation struggles with memory and runtime constraints beyond tens of millions of gates.^[2] In typical design flows, simulation dominates early-stage activities, such as RTL-level debugging and unit testing of individual blocks, where its setup speed and fine-grained observability facilitate rapid iterations and coverage analysis.^[22] Emulation is reserved for later phases, including full-chip integration, hardware-software co-verification, and system-level testing, where its performance enables realistic workloads like operating system booting or protocol interactions that would be infeasible in simulation.^[24] This complementary usage optimizes verification efficiency, with simulation handling exploratory phases and emulation accelerating validation of integrated systems.^[2]

Logic Modeling in Emulation

Hardware emulation systems primarily represent digital signals using 2-state logic, consisting of binary values 0 and 1, which abstracts away analog effects and focuses on functional behavior akin to actual silicon implementation.^[13] This approach contrasts with software simulation, which typically employs 4-state logic including 0, 1, X (unknown or conflicting), and Z (high-impedance) to model uncertainties and tri-state conditions more comprehensively.^[25] To achieve compatibility with hardware platforms, multi-state signals from hardware description languages are converted to 2-state representations through assumptions that resolve ambiguous values; for instance, X states are mapped to 0 or 1 based on context or default rules, while Z states may be treated as pulled to a defined level.^[25] Tri-state buses, common in designs for shared data lines, are handled in emulation by modeling them with combinatorial logic such as multiplexers or enable-controlled drivers, ensuring only one active driver at a time via protocol emulation or arbitration; options include pull-up, pull-down, or latching the previous state when no driver is enabled to simulate high-impedance behavior without true Z support.^[13]^[26] The use of 2-state logic enables faster signal propagation in emulation, as binary decisions eliminate the computational overhead of evaluating and propagating unknown or impedance states, allowing execution at speeds up to 1.5 MHz in processor-based systems and providing up to 115 times acceleration over 4-state simulation for complex designs.^[13]^[25] However, this simplification can lead to loss of edge-case detection, such as uninitialized signals or bus contention errors that would manifest as X or Z in simulation, potentially masking power intent bugs like missing isolation cells.^[25] The effective delay in such models is a function of clock cycles and the streamlined 2-state resolution, reducing evaluation time per gate compared to multi-state handling.^[13] To address these limitations, verification processes incorporate techniques like fault injection, where X states are deliberately introduced via RTL modifications or scripting commands (e.g., TCL force) to simulate unknown conditions and uncover issues such as signal corruption during power-down sequences that 2-state modeling might overlook.^[25] This method enhances coverage by compensating for the abstraction, ensuring more robust design validation without shifting to resource-intensive 4-state emulation modes.^[25]

Emulation Hardware Architectures

Modern hardware emulators primarily rely on reconfigurable processors, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), to map and execute digital designs at scale.^[27] These systems evolved from early processor-based architectures, which used arrays of custom arithmetic logic units (ALUs) to evaluate Boolean functions in a scheduled, time-multiplexed manner, to dominant FPGA-based designs that employ lookup tables (LUTs) and configurable logic blocks to directly implement gate-level logic.^[7] Processor-based emulators, exemplified by systems like Cadence Palladium, offer high visibility through active processing but consume significantly more power—up to an order of magnitude higher than FPGA alternatives—necessitating advanced cooling.^[27] In contrast, FPGA-based architectures, such as those using Xilinx Virtex or AMD Versal devices, provide greater capacity and flexibility for complex synthesizable netlists, though they require careful mapping to avoid routing congestion.^[28] Core components include the reconfigurable processors interconnected via high-speed fabrics to form scalable clusters. Interconnect fabrics, often mesh or crossbar topologies, enable low-latency communication between FPGAs, with examples like two-layer meshes supporting 48- to 96-bit links for efficient data transfer in multi-chip setups.^[29] Host interfaces, typically Ethernet or PCIe-based, facilitate design loading, control, and data exchange with external workstations or test environments, allowing remote operation and integration with software tools.^[30] For instance, multi-board FPGA clusters, such as those in the BEE emulation engine, aggregate 20 Virtex-E FPGAs per unit to handle million-gate designs, scaling to larger systems through hierarchical interconnections.^[29] Scaling in these architectures is achieved through hierarchical partitioning, dividing the design into balanced subnets assigned to individual chips or boards to optimize resource utilization and minimize inter-chip delays.^[14] This process supports capacities reaching up to 40 billion gates in 2020s systems, as seen in Siemens' Veloce platforms combining custom chips and high-density FPGAs across multiple blades linked by fiber optics.^[28] Key features include clock synchronization via phase-locked loops (PLLs) and distributed generators to maintain precise timing across components, often achieving resolutions under 5 ppm for clocks up to 200 MHz.^[29] I/O emulation supports protocols like PCIe for high-bandwidth peripherals and Ethernet for networked control, enabling in-circuit connections to real devices.^[31] Power modeling integrates hardware-accelerated estimation, running alongside the design on FPGAs to predict consumption with fine-grained activity tracking, aiding early optimization in large-scale emulations.^[32] The compilation process begins with RTL synthesis to generate a gate-level netlist, followed by partitioning algorithms that employ graph-based heuristics—such as hypergraph partitioning—to balance computational load and communication volume across chips while respecting timing constraints.^[14] These algorithms, often iterative and multi-level, minimize cut edges in the design graph to reduce interconnect overhead, enabling compilation times under an hour for million-gate designs in optimized FPGA flows.^[33] In processor-based systems, scheduling assigns operations to time steps on ALUs, whereas FPGA compilation includes place-and-route to fit logic into LUTs and routing resources.^[14]

Applications

Design Verification

Hardware emulation plays a crucial role in the verification of complex digital designs, particularly for full system-on-chip (SoC) implementations, by enabling the execution of billions of test cycles at speeds unattainable through traditional simulation alone.^[22]^[24] This capability allows verification engineers to exercise the entire design under realistic workloads, uncovering subtle functional issues that might otherwise remain hidden until later stages. Integration with Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) testbenches further enhances this process, as these standardized environments can be ported seamlessly to emulation platforms, maintaining consistency in stimulus generation and response checking across verification flows.^[34] For instance, a UVM testbench coupled with an emulator facilitates scalable regression testing for large-scale designs like RISC-V processors, ensuring comprehensive validation without redesigning the verification infrastructure.^[34] Key techniques in hardware emulation for design verification include in-circuit emulation (ICE), which connects the emulated design to real-world peripherals and target systems for accurate interfacing. In ICE, portions of the design logic are mapped onto the emulator while external hardware components interact directly, simulating operational environments that reveal integration bugs early.^[35] Additionally, coverage metrics such as functional coverage and code coverage are employed to quantify verification completeness; functional coverage tracks scenario fulfillment (e.g., state transitions or assertions), while code coverage measures exercised logic paths, toggles, and branches within the register-transfer level (RTL) model.^[36] These metrics guide test prioritization, ensuring that emulation resources focus on unverified design aspects to achieve high confidence in bug detection.^[36] The primary benefits of hardware emulation in verification flows lie in its ability to accelerate pre-silicon validation, thereby reducing time-to-market by identifying and resolving issues before physical prototyping or tape-out. By operating at near-real-time speeds, emulation detects timing-related bugs—such as race conditions or clock domain crossing failures—that are difficult to observe in slower simulation environments.^[35] For example, speed adapters in modern emulators enable at-speed execution, allowing verification of timing-sensitive behaviors in SoCs that would otherwise require costly post-silicon fixes.^[37] Hybrid emulation-simulation environments combine the granularity of simulation for initial debugging with emulation's performance for large-scale runs, often integrating UVM-compatible interfaces to unify the workflow. These setups achieve speedups of 10x to over 1000x compared to pure RTL simulation, depending on design size and test complexity, enabling the completion of exhaustive regressions in days rather than months.^[22]^[38] Tools from vendors like Siemens and Aldec support such hybrids, providing metrics like cycle throughput and coverage closure rates to optimize verification efficiency.^[35]^[38]

Software Development and Co-Verification

Hardware emulation plays a crucial role in co-verification by allowing software engineers to execute operating systems, firmware, and application code on a functional replica of the target hardware before physical silicon is available. This process involves mapping the hardware design, typically described in hardware description languages like Verilog or VHDL, onto emulation platforms such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), where the emulated system can boot and run real software stacks. For instance, in embedded systems development, boot-time testing verifies firmware initialization sequences, interrupt handling, and peripheral interactions in a cycle-accurate environment that mimics the final hardware timing.^[39]^[40] One key advantage of this approach is the enablement of parallel hardware and software development, where software teams can begin driver and application coding independently of hardware fabrication delays, reducing overall time-to-market. Interfacing with virtual peripherals—software models that simulate external devices like sensors or networks—further accelerates testing by decoupling software progress from physical I/O hardware availability. This parallelism has been shown to cut development cycles by allowing early detection of hardware-software mismatches, such as API incompatibilities or timing violations, without waiting for tape-out.^[41]^[42]^[43] Techniques like transaction-level modeling (TLM) enhance co-verification efficiency by abstracting low-level signal details into high-level function calls, enabling faster software execution speeds—often orders of magnitude quicker than cycle-accurate simulation—while maintaining sufficient accuracy for system-level validation. In TLM-based setups, SystemC models facilitate communication between the emulated hardware core and software environments, supporting rapid iteration on algorithms and protocols. For real-time operating systems (RTOS), emulation platforms incorporate timing synchronization to validate deterministic behavior, such as task scheduling under load, ensuring software reliability in constrained environments.^[44]^[45]^[46] In the automotive industry, hardware emulation supports co-verification of electronic control units (ECUs) by running AUTOSAR-compliant software stacks pre-tapeout, allowing validation of control algorithms for features like advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) in a hardware-like setting. Similarly, for AI accelerators, emulation enables pre-silicon testing of inference frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch on emulated designs, booting Linux-based OS to assess workload performance and optimize drivers before fabrication. These applications demonstrate how emulation bridges the gap between isolated hardware verification and full-system software integration, fostering collaborative design flows in complex domains.^[46]^[47]

Comparisons and Limitations

Emulation vs. Prototyping

Hardware emulation and prototyping serve distinct roles in the hardware design process, with emulation focused on providing accurate, configurable verification of register-transfer level (RTL) designs through dedicated hardware platforms that mimic the target system's behavior at cycle-accurate speeds.^[48] In contrast, prototyping typically employs field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to create functional demonstrations of the system, emphasizing real-world integration and software execution rather than exhaustive verification.^[49] A primary contrast lies in their approaches to timing and fidelity: emulation achieves cycle-accuracy by replicating the exact clock cycles and states of the target hardware, enabling precise debugging and handling of unknown or corner-case states through rapid reconfiguration of the design.^[50] Prototyping, however, often operates at higher abstraction levels, approximating functionality on FPGAs with faster runtime speeds (e.g., over 10 MHz) but potentially introducing timing discrepancies due to FPGA-specific optimizations like manual partitioning.^[49] This makes emulation superior for early-stage verification where reconfiguration allows iterative testing of design variants, while prototyping excels in validating stable designs against external interfaces.^[48] Trade-offs between the two highlight their complementary strengths: prototyping is generally faster and cheaper to implement, with compilation times often under an hour and lower ownership costs, but it offers limited verifiability due to reduced visibility into internal signals and challenges in scaling to billion-gate designs without significant manual effort.^[49] Emulation, though more resource-intensive and slower in reconfiguration for very large changes, provides superior debug capabilities, such as full signal tracing, making it ideal for identifying subtle bugs in complex systems.^[50] For instance, emulation is commonly used for in-depth debug during design closure, whereas prototyping supports form-factor testing and firmware bring-up in a near-production environment.^[48] Hybrid approaches leverage emulation's verification data to streamline prototyping by partitioning designs—running critical RTL blocks in emulation for accurate analysis before porting stabilized components to FPGA prototypes for performance validation and system integration.^[51] This integration, supported by tools like transactors for seamless data exchange, reduces overall design cycle time by informing prototype optimizations with emulation-derived insights on hardware-software interactions.^[52]

Advantages and Challenges

Hardware emulation offers significant advantages in speed and capacity for verifying complex integrated circuits. Modern systems achieve high-speed execution, operating at clock rates up to several hundred MHz for optimized paths, with typical speeds in the tens of MHz, enabling real-time testing of designs that would be impractically slow in software simulation.^[53] This performance allows for rapid regression testing and software bring-up, far surpassing simulation speeds for large-scale verification. Additionally, emulation platforms provide exceptional scalability, supporting multi-billion-gate designs such as those exceeding 48 billion gates in a single configuration, which facilitates handling the complexity of advanced SoCs without partitioning limitations.^[54] A key benefit is enhanced debug visibility through integrated probes and tools, allowing at-speed signal monitoring and waveform capture without recompilation, which accelerates bug detection and resolution.^[54] Despite these strengths, hardware emulation faces notable challenges related to cost, preparation, and usability. Upfront costs for emulation systems often exceed $1 million, including hardware acquisition, installation, and maintenance, making it a substantial investment primarily viable for large organizations.^[55] Compilation times for mapping designs to the emulator can range from hours to several days, particularly for billion-gate SoCs, leading to delays in iterative verification workflows.^[56] Setup complexity arises from interfacing the emulator with external environments, such as testbenches or peripherals, requiring specialized expertise to manage signal integrity and synchronization issues.^[57] To address these challenges, mitigation strategies have emerged, including cloud-based emulation services introduced post-2020, which eliminate the need for on-premises hardware purchases and provide scalable access on demand.^[58] For large projects, ROI analysis is essential, demonstrating that emulation's high initial costs are offset by reduced overall design cycle times—often shortening verification phases by weeks compared to simulation—yielding net savings through faster time-to-market.^[59] Quantitatively, emulation's cost per gate has declined steadily, now approaching levels competitive with advanced simulation for massive designs, though it remains higher for smaller projects.^[2] In terms of downtime metrics, emulation minimizes idle periods in design cycles by enabling orders-of-magnitude faster execution than simulation (typically MHz vs. Hz clock rates) for billion-gate SoCs, reducing total verification downtime from months to weeks in typical flows.^[1] Compared to simulation, emulation provides orders-of-magnitude speedup for large designs, though prototyping offers a lower-cost alternative for pre-silicon validation at the expense of speed.^[55]^[60]

Future Directions

Emerging trends in hardware emulation are increasingly incorporating artificial intelligence to automate design partitioning, enabling more efficient allocation of complex circuits across emulation resources. AI-driven frameworks leverage multi-agent generative approaches to optimize partitioning decisions, reducing manual intervention and improving overall verification throughput for large-scale designs.^[61] This integration addresses the growing complexity of system-on-chip (SoC) designs by dynamically balancing load and minimizing inter-partition communication overheads.^[62] Concurrently, there is a notable shift toward cloud-based and hybrid emulation models, which enhance accessibility by allowing distributed teams to share high-capacity emulation resources without the need for on-premises infrastructure. These models provide scalability and cost-effectiveness, particularly for legacy system emulation like SPARC architectures, while supporting remote collaboration in verification workflows.^[63] Advancements in emulation capabilities are extending to support quantum and analog-mixed signal systems, facilitating the verification of emerging hybrid computing paradigms. Hybrid digital-analog emulators enable the simulation of quantum physics processes using mixed-signal integrated circuits, offering a classical alternative for testing quantum-inspired algorithms before full quantum hardware deployment.^[64] Additionally, the adoption of 3D integrated circuits (3D ICs) in emulation platforms promises higher capacities through vertical stacking, which increases transistor density and interconnect efficiency to handle billion-gate designs more effectively. Market projections indicate the 3D IC sector will expand significantly, supporting emulation systems that scale to verify next-generation hyperscale processors.^[65] Looking ahead, key challenges include improving energy efficiency in large-scale emulators, where power consumption can rival that of data centers during extended verification runs. Efforts focus on dynamic power analysis during emulation to identify and mitigate inefficiencies early, such as through hardware-assisted techniques that model static and dynamic dissipation.^[66] Standardization of interfaces remains critical, with ongoing developments in protocols like the Standard Co-Emulation Modeling Interface (SCE-MI) to ensure seamless interoperability between emulation hardware and software tools.^[67] In the industry outlook, hardware emulation plays a pivotal role in verifying hyperscale computing systems, where it accelerates hardware-software co-verification for AI accelerators and data center chips. Recent discussions at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2024 highlighted the need for optimized emulation flows to manage the high costs and complexities of these platforms, emphasizing performance improvements like 5x speedups in visibility-preserving emulation.^[68]^[69] These trends position emulation as essential for sustaining innovation in compute-intensive applications through 2030.

References

[1]
What is Hardware Emulation? - S2C FPGA Prototyping
In IC (integrated circuit) design, hardware emulation imitates the behavior of one or more pieces of hardware (typically a system under design) with another ...
[2]
Emulation - Semiconductor Engineering
Emulation is a technology whereby the design is transformed into an implementation capable of being executed on special purpose hardware.<|control11|><|separator|>
[3]
Hardware Emulation - 2025.1 English - UG1273
Hardware emulation allows you to simulate the entire design and test the interactions between the PL, PS, and AI Engine prior to implementation. Because ...
[4]
Early Hardware Emulation — Birth of a New Technology - EDN
Feb 6, 2018 · In the second half of the 1980s, a new verification technology was conceived. Called hardware emulation, it was promoted as being able to verify ...
[5]
A Renaissance in the Emulation Business Is Nigh - EE Times
Dec 16, 2019 · Hardware emulation was conceived in the mid-1980s by a few pioneers who identified an opportunity for field programmable gate-array (FPGA), ...
[6]
Hardware Emulation: Three Decades of Evolution – Part III
Nov 11, 2015 · It was first introduced in 1997 by Quickturn Design Systems under the commercial name of CoBALT™ (Concurrent Broadcast Array Logic Technology).
[7]
Hardware Emulation: Three Decades of Evolution – Part II
Jun 9, 2022 · In 1998, Cadence® purchased Quickturn and over time launched five generations of processor-based emulators under the name of Palladium®. Two or ...
[8]
Hardware Emulation in Mid-Life — Moving to Center Stage - EDN
Feb 13, 2018 · In the new millennium, hardware emulation moved into the verification mainstream and is considered the foundation of many verification ...
[9]
Market-Driven Trends in Hardware Emulation - EE Times
Jun 6, 2021 · A look at vertical market industries and the trends that impact the design of the verification landscape and adoption of hardware emulation ...
[10]
A primer on processor-based emulation - EE Times
Oct 21, 2004 · An emulation cycle consists of running all the processor steps for a complete modeling of the design. Large designs typically schedule in from ...
[11]
Design Compilation in Hardware Emulators - EE Times
The compiler for an FPGA-based emulator requires leading-edge synthesis, partitioning, timing analysis, clock mapping, and place-and-route technologies.
[12]
[PDF] Four Technologies Converge In Hardware Emulation
Oct 9, 2013 · Once you have the hardware, the next step calls for mapping the design-under-test (DUT) onto the box. The process is known as compilation. While ...Missing: workflow | Show results with:workflow
[13]
Zycad: Emulating Hardware on Hardware | The CPU Shack Museum
Apr 13, 2017 · In the late 80's and early 90's the main Zycad emulation system was the XP series. The XP series (consisting of the 100, 140 and 200) was based ...
[14]
The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of In-Circuit Emulation (Part 1 of 2)
Sep 11, 2025 · The early adoption of hardware acceleration in the design verification process marked a pivotal shift in how semiconductor designs were tested ...
[15]
Synopsys Continues to Sell, Ship and Support ZeBu Emulation ...
Mar 12, 2015 · The release also includes technology for up to 3X faster compile performance and Unified Debug with the market-leading Verdi solution. "We have ...
[16]
https://www.cpushack.com/2017/04/13/zycad-emulating-hardware-on-hardware/
[17]
[PDF] Hardware Design Verification: Simulation and Formal Method ...
Nov 10, 2003 · Hardware Design Verification systematically presents today's most valuable simulation-based and formal verification techniques, helping test ...
[18]
Emulation Systems | Synopsys
Synopsys ZeBu emulation systems are modular, fast, and used for SoC verification and software bring-up, with the ZeBu Server 5 offering 2x performance.Missing: 2020 | Show results with:2020
[19]
Emulation and simulation; invaluable tools for IC verification
Dec 6, 2016 · A hardware emulation tool can run the verification of large, SoC designs over 10 times and sometimes much greater than 10 times faster than software simulation.
[20]
https://faculty.sist.shanghaitech.edu.cn/faculty/songfu/cav/Lam05.pdf
[21]
What is HAV Emulation? – How it Works - Synopsys
Sep 4, 2025 · Because HAV emulation operates at much higher speeds than simulation, it is possible to test millions or even billions of cycles, uncovering ...
[22]
[PDF] Innovative 4-State Logic Emulation for Power-aware Verification
Hardware emulation has long been implemented with 2-state logic, while the de facto standard for software-based simulation is 4-state logic.
[23]
Method for implementing tri-state nets in a logic emulation system
A control bus is connected to all MA and MD chips to allow these signals, and bus interface control signals, to be sent to the MD chips. 1.3.1.2.2 Memory Data ...
[24]
Budgeting for Hardware Emulation Platforms - GSA
Feb 24, 2023 · The differentiator among the three emulators is power consumption. Processor-based emulators are the most power hungry since processor devices ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[25]
Siemens claims breakthrough with 40bn gates of emulation ...
Feb 20, 2024 · Siemens has re-architected its emulation and hardware assisted verification systems in a major change to emulate designs with up to 40bn gates.Missing: 2020s | Show results with:2020s
[26]
[PDF] a Real-time Large-scale Hardware Emulation Engine - USC
This paper describes the hardware implementation of a real-time, large-scale, multi-chip FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based emulation engine with a ...
[27]
Connecting Emulated Design to External PCI Express Device - Blog
Emulation allows you to connect the emulated design with real devices known as In-Circuit-Emulation (ICE), and this is the subject I wish to elaborate on in ...
[28]
In-Circuit Emulation - Cadence
Emulators use physical or hard interfaces like SpeedBridge, EDK, Memory, I/O, JTAG board to enable physical connection, synchronization, and handshaking ...Missing: key clock
[29]
http://ultra.usc.edu/assets/002/37068.pdf
[30]
High quality hypergraph partitioning for logic emulation
In this paper, we present a suite of algorithms to solve the partitioning problem in general field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) prototyping and hardware ...Missing: process | Show results with:process
[31]
A Unified Verification Scheme for the Acceleration of RISC-V ...
The non-synthesizable UVM test bench is coupled with the hardware emulator to constitute a generalizable and flexible verification platform. By mapping RTL ...
[32]
Acceleration | Emulation | Siemens Verification Academy
In-Circuit Emulation (ICE). In-circuit emulation involves replacing certain portions of the design with actual hardware components connected to the emulator.
[33]
Coverage metrics for functional validation of hardware designs
Aug 6, 2025 · Coverage metrics ensure optimal use of simulation resources, measure the completeness of validation, and direct simulations toward unexplored areas of the ...Missing: emulation ICE
[34]
How Emulation Helps Find Power Bugs During SoC Verification
Jul 6, 2021 · We explain how to find dynamic power & leakage power bugs during SoC verification, using pre-silicon emulation for full-stack system-level ...
[35]
The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of In-Circuit Emulation: Real-World...
Oct 20, 2025 · Adopting Synopsys Speed Adapters allows for accurate physical layer representation, enabling efficient pre-silicon testing and reducing the time ...
[36]
UVM Simulation Acceleration - Aldec, Inc
Emulation driven by a transaction level testbench runs thousands times faster than pure HDL simulation breaking the obstacle in efficient use of constrained ...
[37]
User-Space Emulation Framework for Domain-Specific SoC Design
In this work, we propose a portable, Linux-based emulation framework to provide an ecosystem for hardware-software co-design of Domain-specific SoCs (DSSoCs)
[38]
Turbocharging AI: How Hardware-Assisted Verification Fuels the ...
Apr 22, 2025 · Despite the architectural differences, both CPUs and AI accelerators necessitate rigorous pre-silicon validation through software workload ...
[39]
Bare Metal Tests and Hardware-Software Co-Verification
Jan 23, 2017 · Let's start by defining hardware-software co-verification, in which you are running production software or a close facsimile (perhaps with ...Missing: firmware | Show results with:firmware
[40]
https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/fv/posts/bare-metal-tests-and-hardware-software-co-verification
[41]
Use Transaction-Level Models to ensure hardware and software are ...
SystemC-based Transaction-Level Models (TLMs) ease communication and synchronization between software and hardware design teams.
[42]
Enabling chip design verification with hardware-assisted verification
Logic designers use an emulator to integrate IP and for chip-level verification. Software developers attempt to boot an operating system on the chip design ...
[43]
Testbench Co-Emulation: SystemC & TLM-2.0 - Verification Academy
Oct 27, 2011 · With co-emulation you can regain the performance needed to do system level tasks as you did in your virtual prototype environment. This track ...
[44]
(PDF) Transaction Level Modeling - ResearchGate
Transaction level modeling (TLM) is put forward as a promising solution above Register Transfer Level (RTL) in the SoC design flow.
[45]
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226281164_Transaction_Level_Modeling
[46]
The Case for Hardware-Assisted Verification in Complex SoCs
Mar 14, 2025 · With HAV, developers can boot an operating system on the emulated accelerator or use an FPGA prototype to run real AI workloads against the ...
[47]
What's the Difference between Emulation and Prototyping? - SemiWiki
Sep 10, 2015 · Emulation automatically compiles if the design is compatible, while prototyping requires manual optimization. Emulation uses custom processors, ...Missing: distinction CPU
[48]
FPGA Prototyping vs Emulation - S2C.
To summarize, FPGA Prototyping today is generally more affordable than fpga emulation, it can achieve much higher runtime speeds, and design capacity has been ...
[49]
The Convergence of Emulation and Prototyping - Blog - Aldec, Inc
Emulation is used to verify that a design meets its functional requirements, where the verification is performed by emulating the hardware and simulating ...
[50]
Hybrid Emulation Takes Center Stage - Semiconductor Engineering
Jul 25, 2019 · At the highest level, hybrid emulation is defined by part of the system in a host server, with the other part of the system in emulation or ...
[51]
Hybrid Prototyping: Integrating Virtual & FPGA-based ... - Synopsys
Feb 7, 2023 · Synopsys' hybrid prototyping solution blends the strengths of both virtual and FPGA-based prototyping to enable software development and system integration ...
[52]
Palladium Emulation - Cadence
Cadence Palladium emulation platforms provide early hardware/software co-verification and debug and in-circuit emulation.
[53]
Emulation - Tech Design Forum Techniques
Emulators would cost upwards of $1M, and RTL simulation in software could deliver similar results and debug visibility at lower cost within an acceptable time.
[54]
Hardware emulation and system compilation takes long time
Apr 6, 2020 · Is it normal? I looked at another post that the normal compilation time is hours for hardware emulations and hours to 1 day for a system build.
[55]
Modeling Techniques to Speed up Simulation and Emulation in ...
Jan 28, 2025 · VCS provides a wide range of features for logic simulation, including debug tools and advanced verification techniques.
[56]
ZeBu Cloud: Hosted Emulation Solution - Synopsys
ZeBu Cloud is a hosted, turn-key emulation solution for software bring-up, hosted in Synopsys data center, and supports hardware-assisted verification.Missing: Cadence 2020
[57]
Hardware emulation future is exciting - EDN
May 23, 2020 · In fact, a return-on-investment (ROI) analysis proves that the tool acquisition and operational costs pale vis-à-vis the savings from meeting ...Missing: large | Show results with:large
[58]
Prototype Verification System VS Hardware Emulator, Which One Is ...
Another key traditional difference between emulators and prototyping systems is debugging. The hardware emulator has large-capacity and full-system emulation ...
[59]
AI-Driven Automation for Digital Hardware Design: A Multi-Agent ...
Aug 15, 2025 · This paper presents a novel AI-driven framework for automating digital hardware design through a multi-agent generative approach. By combining ...<|separator|>
[60]
[PDF] Bridging the Gap Between Emulation Partitioning and Scheduling
The design-under-test (DUT) is first converted into a 4-input lookup-table (4-LUT)-based netlist via logic synthesis. This is followed by a compilation process.Missing: workflow | Show results with:workflow
[61]
Emulating the Future of SPARC Hardware - Stromasys
SPARC hardware emulation in the cloud offers cost-effectiveness, scalability, enhanced performance, and heightened security.
[62]
Designing a Hybrid Digital / Analog Quantum Physics Emulator as ...
Feb 2, 2023 · One of the most exciting quantum emulation [1] breakthroughs was the first analog signal-based emulation of a universal quantum computer [2].Missing: advancements | Show results with:advancements
[63]
3D IC Market Analysis, Statistics, and Future Forecast
3D IC Market size was $16223.79 million and is projected at $63748.14 million by 2032, CAGR 18.66%.Missing: emulation capacity
[64]
Early SoC Dynamic Power Analysis Needs Hardware Emulation
Apr 16, 2024 · Two primary factors contribute to energy dissipation in semiconductors: static power consumption and dynamic power dissipation. While both are ...
[65]
[PDF] Standard Co-Emulation Modeling Interface (SCE-MI ... - Accellera
Every Accellera Standard is subjected to review periodically for revision and update. Users are cautioned to check to determine that they have the latest.<|separator|>
[66]
Hyperscale Computing|Design with Optimal Performance ... - Cadence
Learn how to use emulation, prototyping, and metric-driven verification to optimize hardware/software interaction and shift-left software development.
[67]
Siemens Hardware-Assisted Verification at the 2024 Design...
Jun 20, 2024 · Veloce Strato CS delivers significant emulation performance improvement over Veloce Strato, up to 5x maintaining full visibility and it scales ...