Electronic Design Automation

8.1. Introduction

Simulation empowers a designer to predict a design's behavior without physically implementing it. In the design phase, the main purpose of simulation is design verification. Figure 8.1 depicts the flow of using simulation for design verification. During each design stage, the functional specification documents the required functionality and performance for the design and a corresponding circuit description is generated in conformance with the given specification. To ensure conformance, verification testbenches consisting of a set of input stimuli and expected output responses are created. The simulator then takes the circuit description and the input stimuli as inputs and produces the simulated responses. Any discrepancy between ...