SoC Emulation: Bursting Into Its Prime

When you turn the key in a modern car, you set in motion a chain of electronic events more complex, in some cases, than you'll find in a Boeing 787 or an F22 jet-fighter. The magic that makes this possible is captured in the many System-on-Chip (SoC) devices and software you'll find buried around the car. Leveraging many of the concepts at the heart of your smartphone, each of these SoC devices is itself very complex and must be validated extensively before manufacturing, to prove that it will always operate correctly and safely. Traditional methods used in validation, primarily simulation, are still widely used but are simply too slow to allow for the exhaustive levels of testing required to have high confidence in validation. This need has driven the semiconductor support industry to create special-purpose emulation engines to massively accelerate the SoC verification task. This book, targeted to general readers in the semiconductor and systems industry, describes the origins of SoC emulation and different approaches to addressing the need. It also describes some of the newer applications for emulation in SoC design. To illustrate current usage the second part of the book discusses how SoC emulation can be applied to verifying a controller for the solid-state drive (SSD) data storage now found in many modern devices.