Emulation and its connection to test

Abstract

As electronic chip designs are predominately System-On-Chip (SoC), hardware emulation has become a crucial tool for pre-silicon hardware and software validation. Pre-silicon emulation models are often available many quarters before tapeout and are used in many areas such as OS boot, software driver development, and system stress and performance testing. Increasingly hardware emulation is used in the development of test contents and to verify the quality of tools and processes used in post-silicon testing. This presentation will cover how hardware emulation aids pre- and post-silicon testing and debugging of SoC infrastructure functions for testability, reliability, and repairability.