Hardware emulation arose as a necessity out of the needs of the eighties. By the mid-1980s, semiconductor designs had outgrown the practical limits of gate-level simulation. Gate-level simulation delivered accuracy, but at glacial pace; silicon prototypes performed at real-speed but arrived far too late. The industry needed a new instrument, a verification engine capable of executing real hardware...
The evolution of hardware emulation reflects a broader pattern in technology: the tension between specialization and generalization. Processor-based emulation, with its roots in IBM's work, offered a scalable alternative to FPGA-based systems but at the cost of higher power consumption and infrastructure requirements. Custom-FPGA-based emulation, pioneered by Meta System, provided a more hardware-centric approach with lower power consumption but faced challenges in logic density and execution sp...