12 Dec
2006
12 Dec
'06
8:51 a.m.
Did anyone salvage any of the very expensive hardware
simulators of
the mid 80's?
Mentor and Valid both had systems which could integrate actual parts
into a software simulation (Valid's was called RealChip).
The largest of these sorts of things were seas of Xilix FPGAs that
attemtpted to simulate entire designs. The software wasn't very good,
and while they simulated the design a few orders of magnitude faster
than software simulators, they still were not very fast. One of these
showed up at BDI this past year, with absolutely no interest from bidders.
I worked on MacOS bootstrapping of both the G3 at Somerset and the
Exponential BiCMOS processors on those.