The Effects of Modeling on Simulator Performance

Gate-level simulators are usually thought of in terms of their benefits to logic designers, while behavioral simulators are considered to be the province of system architects. However, the behavioral modeling capabilities of a multilevel gate/behavioral simulator significantly enhanced the performance and accuracy of what are essentially gate-level simulations. The Behave simulator is a multilevel simulator that can simulate circuits at several levels of abstraction-behavioral level, gate level, or a mixture. Zero delay and rank order capability are also available in Behave and can be used to advantage. For example, in a simulation of an array multiplier involving 10,000 vectors, the time decreased from 16 hours to 38 minutes, simply because the elements were rank ordered. This range of processing is possible because of the flexibility in software for general-purpose CPUs.