Design teams today push the envelope with large, complex designs containing many functional components. They must tackle complexity, throughput, latency, cost, battery lifetime and time-tomarket issues for successive product versions. Rapid product development for a highly competitive market is a must, as design teams work on products such as mobile wireless platforms, which seamlessly access services while roaming, such as video conferencing, movie-watching, and multi-platform gaming.

Producing highly complex products within short time frames is crucial to business success. With verification being the major element of product development, verification time savings directly accelerates delivery to customers. As designers seek to reduce their risk and increase their design confidence, the pressures result in demanding verification needs such as high-performance verification acceleration, 100 percent observability, and full testing coverage.

Many designers are adopting emulation with a target platform as their primary verification methodology. This methodology allows them to ensure that their software is ready and debugged before the chip comes back from the foundry.