I had a chat with a friend yesterday who announced: “Less efforting is working for me.” The use of the noun effort as a verb –– efforting –– didn’t send me to my online dictionary to check my grammar or linguistic skills. Instead, it took me back 30-odd years to the early days of hardware emulation when efforting could have been the catchphrase.
In those days from the 1980s, the emulator arrived with a crew of applications engineers (AEs in a box, we used to say). Even they didn’t have a magic touch –– it seemingly took forever to tweak the system just so to get it to work. Pricing required some justification efforting as well because they were expense verification tools. As a result, they were reserved for only the largest and most complex chip designs, which, in those days average about 100,000 ASIC gates. Big price tag, big chips, lots of efforting.
Efforting continued into the 1990s as hardware emulation became a bit more popular, though they were an unsightly mess with cables snaking around the boxes, like spaghetti enveloping meatballs, so much so that they were relegated to a back room. With all those cables came in circuit emulation (ICE), the default, actually the only use model to verify the design-under-test (DUT) with real traffic data. While effective, the data in and out of the emulator ran at a lower speed than the actual speed of the real traffic data, requiring the insertion of speed adapters and additional efforting. Further, the manned supervision commanded by the ICE mode limited hardware emulation’s ability to become a shared remote resource.
