Emulation in Flip Flops (Part 2)

Simulation runtime stops scaling long before your gate count does. Somewhere past a few hundred million gates, the weekend regression becomes the critical path, and the decision to move to emulation stops being academic. In this episode we host Frank Schirrmeister, Executive Director of Strategic Programs, System Solutions at Synopsys, who has worked across emulation and hardware-assisted verification for most of his career. What we cover: The real decision boundary between simulation, emulation, and FPGA prototyping, and the workloads where each one is the wrong tool. Where emulation earns its cost: long software-driven tests, full-SoC scenarios, power and performance analysis, and pre-silicon software bring-up. And where teams burn capacity on jobs that belonged in simulation. AI in emulation. Trends review. How startups and large enterprises use emulation slight differently. How AI and large accelerator designs are pushing runtime, capacity, and debug visibility, and what that does to a verification plan. Where Frank sees emulation heading, and what's hype versus what's actually changing in the flow. This is Part 2 of the conversation. Useful if you run verification, plan compute for it, or want a clearer mental model of when hardware-assisted verification is worth it.