Distributed simulation of VHDL using Jini

VHDL is a programming language used for describing the behaviour and structure of large hardware systems. Due to the prohibitive cost of silicon fabrication, any code written in VHDL needs to be extensively simulated before synthesis. However, the simulation time can be extremely long because of the complexity of these designs. Parallel simulation can be used to speed up simulation run time (Meister, 1996)., and is particularly effective when simulations are demanding in terms of processing time. A new Time Warp distributed VHDL simulator has been developed using Jini, a Java and RMI-based API created for the development of distributed applications.