Designing the design process: applying performance evaluation to verification technologies

Verification times for electronic system designs typically require more than half the over-all design effort. With the substantial costs and increasing importance of system verification technologies, determining the best verification strategy, is critical to complex systems design. As a tool to improve the design process, we apply a model to perform tradeoffs between the different types of emulation, hardware acceleration, and simulation verification tools available. The predictive power of the modeling approach is applied to usage scenarios to determine the most appropriate mix of verification technologies to employ in development efforts.