Challenges in Large FPGA-based Logic Emulation Systems

Functional verification is an important aspect of electronic design automation. Traditionally, simulation at the register transfer-level has been the mainstream functional verification approach. Formal verification and various static analysis checkers have been used to complement specific corners of logic simulation. However, as the size of IC designs grow exponentially, all the above approaches fail to scale with the design growth. In recent years, logic emulation have gained popularity in functional verification, partly due to their performance and scalability benefits. There are two main approaches to logic emulation: ASIC and commercial field-programmable gate array (FPGA). In this paper, we focus on commercial FPGA based logic emulation and present various challenging problems in this area for the academic community.