Taking the best out of two worlds: prototyping and hardware emulation

In recent high complex system-on-a-chip designs timely verification becomes more and more the bottleneck in the overall design task.. A novel approach is presented to overcome the limitations of hardware emulation on one side and rapid system prototyping on the other side. This approach combines the benefits of both methods, while their respective drawbacks are reduced. At Philips Semiconductors this approach is used to verify the recent GSM/GPRS/UMTS baseband processor. This paper describes in detail the setup of this approach, including design flow and details of the used hardware. Also the practical experience and the obtained results are presented.