The EVE companion simulator

This paper describes the EVE companion simulator, ECS, a four-valued gate level simulator which compliments a simulation methodology that uses the engineering verification engine, EVE. ECS is, like EVE, a zero- and unit-delay cycle simulator, but unlike EVE, ECS is a software simulator which runs on a general purpose computer. The basic simulation paradigm of ECS is event driven to exploit latency. ECS uses the same design description interface as EVE, enabling an EVE model to be run on either the hardware accelerator or the software simulator. The major use of ECS is in the interactive debug of large models, where the model is run on the hardware accelerator, a checkpoint is taken and then loaded into the software simulator. In this paper, the authors give an overview of the ECS architecture and simulation technique, and describes how ECS is used in conjunction with EVE