If you’ve been through a tapeout, you know this already: the design isn’t done when RTL is complete, it’s done when you trust it.. That trust is built in verification. As hardware and software have become inseparable, verification has quietly become the critical path.
It’s no longer enough to prove that blocks behave correctly in isolation. What matters is whether the system behaves as expected under real workloads, before silicon exists.. This paper examines that shift from a practical perspective and explains how pre-silicon emulation, particularly with Cadence ProtiumTM, fits into a modern verification flow without turning the process into a separate engineering project.
