Today's Complex Networking Chips Demand Hardware Emulation

By EETimes

October 23, 2015

Project teams designing complex switches and routers have turned to hardware emulation as the foundation for their verification strategy to battle network congestion and outages.

We consumers are needy -- the three billion or so of us who use electronic devices want on-demand access to download emails, texts, videos, and all other forms of communications fast and (often) at the same time. It's little wonder, then, that networking switch and router designs have become some of the most complex of all chip designs as their sizes and complexities push north of five-hundred million ASIC-equivalent gates.

It is an axiom that the more complex the chip, the more difficult verification becomes because of all the paths that need to be verified. With embedded software nowadays implementing more and more chip functionality, thorough chip verification and validation is getting out of control. In the network domain, efficiency is critical for higher bandwidth, lower latency, and fewer network failures. Collisions are to be avoided at all costs.

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