Understanding Design Capacity in Hardware Emulators

By EETimes

January 12, 2015

Verification Consultant Lauro Rizzatti explains that the three different types of hardware emulator offer different design capacities, thereby giving users more options.

Unlike software simulators, whose specifications do not mention limits in design capacity, a primary specification of hardware emulators is the maximum size of the designs they can handle. More to the point, different emulators have different limits on design capacity. Why is this?

Let's first address the concept of design capacity in a software simulation environment. There is a good reason why the vendors of simulators -- whether logic simulators at the register transfer level (RTL) and electronic system level (ESL), or gate level, or even analog simulators -- don’t specify the maximum capacities of their tools.

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