Emulator, accelerator, prototype - what’s the difference?

Brian Bailey
EETimes (11/1/2010 4:45 PM EDT)

In a previous blog, I talked about the confusion that seems to exist about the similarities and differences between emulators, accelerators and prototypes. In that blog I talked about what makes a prototype unique, and said I would come back to the issue of emulators and accelerators, so here we are.

First off, most of the time, as a user, you don’t really care. The differences are in the internals of how they are implemented, and this may affect the features they make available, but for the most part the confusion is created by the manufacturers of these devices so that they can say they are #1, or unique, or have highest capacity or speed or whatever. Let’s cut through all of that and look at what is fundamentally different. There is an umbrella term for all of them which is hardware assisted verification.

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