Why the OS is the Hub of a Hardware Emulator

By _EETimes Blog

April 6, 2015

The OS shields the software from the hardware and assures the compatibility of any new and old software with any new or old hardware platform.

For more than a decade, I have been following the practice of upgrading my laptop every three years. I do so for more than one reason. After three years of intense use, subjected to the wear and tear of international travel, a laptop gets tired. New generations of hardware run faster, consume less energy, and weigh less. Also, new displays have higher resolutions -- an attribute that tops my list of features.

The mandatory criteria for supporting the upgrade is that the suite of application software I have gathered over time must run, no matter what the underlining hardware is. This is made possible by the operating system (OS). It is the OS, with its embedded drivers, that shields the application software from the hardware and assures the compatibility of any new and old software application with any new or old hardware platform.

Hardware emulators are a unique type of special-purpose compute engines that are designed and built to perform one task, albeit with a multitude of angles -- design verification of digital electronic systems. With a special OS, they verify the functionality of a design without taking into account its timing behavior. They do so at speeds 100,000 to 1,000,000 times faster than any HDL (hardware description language) simulator.

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