In general, integrated circuit (IC) chip development includes a design phase and a verification phase for determining whether a design works as expected. The verification phase has moved increasingly toward a software simulation approach to avoid the costs of first implementing designs in hardware to verify them.
A key factor for developers and marketers of IC chips in being competitive in business is time-to-market of new products; the shorter the time-to-market, the better the prospects for sales. Time-to-market in turn depends to a significant extent on the duration of the verification phase for new products to be released. Due to the complexity of chip development, the time from an almost complete design to silicon availability is a long one.
As chip designs have become more complex, shortcomings in existing chip verification methodologies, which extend time-to-market have become evident. Typically, until a chip is actually fabricated in silicon, a simulator is used to verify the design. A “simulator” refers to specialized software that simulates a circuit, which allows performance projections to be obtained. In general, simulators are used both for correctness verification and performance verification. Performance simulators are typically written in a high-level language such as C or Java. The performance simulator is therefore an abstracted model of the actual design lacking much of the detail in the actual design.
However software models are never completely accurate. Therefore chip projects suffer from significant risks until the performance of the design has been validated using silicon. The lack of performance for a chip can be equally problematic to the viability of a chip project as a correctness error. Therefore accurate modeling and estimations of chip performance is important for a chip project. Being able to verify performance projections early can to a large extent mitigate this risk.