At Mentor Graphics I have to be careful what I say – I am treading on thin ice. The problem is that I am a software engineer. A very large proportion of my colleagues in the company have a hardware design background. Now I would not say that the two disciplines are at war, but there has always been a tension between hardware and software developers. In an embedded design, if something goes wrong, both parties tend to assume that the other is at fault. Worse still, if a hardware design flaw is located late in the development process, it may be too late to fix it economically, so the only option is to accommodate the problem in software. And gosh, does that rankle.
So, I tend to regard hardware as a necessary evil that allows me to run my software. It is probably no surprise, therefore, to learn that a favorite technology of mine is simulation …
