Lauro Rizzatti, General Manager of EVE-USA, EVE

At a macro level, we see an improving business economy throughout Asia, including China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, where semiconductor companies are budgeting for capital equipment purchases. Other parts of the world, including the U.S., look promising as well, something we haven’t seen at this level in close to five years, welcome news for 2011.

At the micro level, the hardware emulation market looks especially strong in 2011 due to a number of factors, including increasing software content, design complexity and simulation’s inability to keep up.

Two trends are limiting the benefits of RTL simulation, the ubiquitous tool in the design flow that’s been commodity for at least 20 years. Despite continuing improvements in RTL simulation technology, a simulator’s execution speed rapidly degrades as design sizes reach into tens of million gates. It gets to a point where the simulator is useless at about 50-million gates or so for anything longer than a million test cycles. As a result, simulators cannot be used for any kind of embedded software validation, whether testing drivers, booting an operating system or processing application programs. Not only that, but the need to verify long serial bitstreams in multimedia applications, such as processing full high-definition video, is also forcing design teams to look at hardware-assisted verification as a viable alternative to simulation.

Hardware-assisted verification, also known as emulation, are hardware platforms used to accelerate the verification process of complex chips, offer rigorous debugging capabilities and work at multiple orders of magnitude faster than simulators. Some design teams may remember the traditional emulators that were expensive and hard to use. The latest generation emulators are much more flexible, easy to set up and use, and are packed in a small footprint. They are often economical, too.

Today’s design teams are working on complex designs that combine interconnected blocks, including RISC processors, DSPs, co-processors and more, and need to debug hardware and develop software in parallel. With hardware emulators, a hardware design group can mirror the development methodology of most software development centers. Software developers verify their code, leaving the quality assurance team to validate the entire software system. Hardware designers can test their module, while a system verification team can perform system integration and carry out the time-consuming regression testing.

At the macro and micro level, the semiconductor and EDA industry will see in 2011 global widespread adoption of hardware emulation on large scale. This embrace of the technology will be across the board for all sorts of designs, a change from high-end applications only, welcome news for design teams and emulation vendors alike.