By G5global on Friday, December 4th, 2020 in ROMs and Emulators. No Comments
Placing and routing a billion ASIC-equivalent gate design on an array of custom FPGAs, performed on a large simulation farm, may take 30 minutes. Placing and routing the same design on a smaller array of Xilinx Virtex-7s will take several hours. The Android emulator comes with the Android SDK which you need to download from here. Then follow the instructions to setup a virtual device and start the emulator. Your job doesn’t end with ensuring your site runs great across Chrome and Android.
One hundred million cycles, though, are not enough to process embedded design software. For this task, it is necessary to execute several billion cycles in sequence since processing software is inherently a sequential process. And, PC farms loaded with HDL simulation licenses cannot come to the rescue.
They’re an alternative to microcontroller design, which requires high speed in a dedicated function. In certain cases, FPGAs eliminate the need to create an expensive custom ASIC. Their low cost and range of sizes make them useful in industrial, medical, aerospace, defense, and even some consumer products. Unfortunately, there are drawbacks to the custom approach that stem from the lower capacity density of the custom chip compared to the largest commercial FPGAs.
Software programs cannot be split in subsets and run in parallel. In our emulation example, software fills in for hardware – creating an environment that behaves in a hardware-like manner. This takes a toll on the processor by allocating cycles to the emulation process – cycles that would instead be utilized executing calculations. Thus, a large part of the CPU muscle is expended in creating this environment.
One disadvantage is that to map any given design size, the emulator would need more FPGAs, leading to larger physical dimensions and heavier weight. The emulator-on-chip enables triggering on registers by default, force-n-release, memory/register peek-and-poke, and save-n-restore. Timing re-synthesis uses correctness-preserving transformations to retime a user’s design by introducing a single, high-speed clock to protect it from inaccurate FPGA delays. It also eliminates the hold-time problems of traditional emulation systems. Both technologies benefit from distributing P&R on PC farms, but the custom approach still has an edge.
Using the same example as before, an emulator running at 1 MHz would take 100 seconds to execute 1 second of real time and process 100 million cycles. An emulator would boot an operating system in an hour or so.
Whereas simulator is a device, computer program or system used during software verification, which behaves or operates like a given system when provided with a set of controlled inputs. on the other hand, the emulator uses hardware to emulate the behavior of your system. For example, if you want to know the way your program will run on a specific microcontroller you get an emulator for that microcontroller and connect the microcontroller to it and see the real output. With an emulator you can see the behavior in different stats of operations, like different temperatures or when it is connected to other peripherals.
Even though Device Mode can simulate a range of other devices like iPhones, we encourage you to check out other browsers solutions for emulation. Transaction-based verification or acceleration is the most promising method in the industry, and offers two advantages. The first is the ability to write testbenches at a higher level of abstraction using an order of magnitude fewer lines of code, making it easier and less prone to errors. The second is that these test benches execute faster than conventional RTL benches, since mapping the bus-functional model of the transactor inside the emulator achieves dramatic acceleration. Another benefit is that TBV or TBX does not require manned supervision to handle speed adapters when users swap designs or new users sign in.
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