A timed HW/SW coemulation technique for fast yet accurate system verification

In system-on-chip (SoC) design, it is essential to verify the correctness of design before a chip is fabricated. While conventional hardware emulators validate functional correctness of hardware components quickly, only a few researches exist to use hardware emulators for timing verification since synchronization between the hardware emulator and the other parts easily overwhelms the gain of hardware emulator. In this paper we propose a novel hardware/software coemulation framework for fast yet accurate system verification based on the virtual synchronization technique. For virtual synchronization, interface protocol and interface logic between a hardware emulator and the HW/SW coemulation kernel are proposed. Experiments with real-life examples prove the effectiveness of the proposed technique.