Viewpoint: Standard FPGA-based emulation will prevail
(02/24/2009 3:50 PM EST)
While emulation is fast becoming the most popular verification tool because design sizes and complexity are defeating software simulation, there's a wide disparity in the kinds of commercially available emulators.
The differences between emulators based on standard field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and those based on custom chips, whether based on custom processors or custom FPGAs, are vast. Moving forward, the standard FPGA-based emulator will ultimately prevail. If nothing else, for economical reasons.
Re-tooling and non-recurring engineering (NRE) charges are exceedingly expensive below 65nm and an emulation market of $200 million is not big enough for a large EDA vendor to justify $30 million to develop the custom chip.
On the other hand, there is a clear and sensible roadmap through the use of standard FPGAs at 45- and 32nm and beyond.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- Flexible Pixel Processor Video IP
- Bluetooth Low Energy 6.0 Digital IP
- MIPI SWI3S Manager Core IP
- Ultra-low power high dynamic range image sensor
- Neural Video Processor IP
Related White Papers
- FPGA-based coprocessors simplify ASIC emulation
- Soc Design -> Emulation verifies multiple network interfaces
- SoCs: DSP World, Cores -> 3G wireless SoC requires emulation
- ESC: Real-time analysis provides transport support for scan-based emulation
Latest White Papers
- Enabling Space-Grade AI/ML with RISC-V: A Fully European Stack for Autonomous Missions
- CANDoSA: A Hardware Performance Counter-Based Intrusion Detection System for DoS Attacks on Automotive CAN bus
- How Next-Gen Chips Are Unlocking RISC-V’s Customization Advantage
- Efficient Hardware-Assisted Heap Memory Safety for Embedded RISC-V Systems
- Automatically Retargeting Hardware and Code Generation for RISC-V Custom Instructions