Emulating switch-level models of CMOS circuits

This paper presents a method for emulating switch-level models of CMOS circuits using FPGAs. In this method, logic gates are used to model switch-level circuits without any abstraction. In contrast to the abstraction methods for which transistors are grouped together to form gates, in this method, gates are grouped together to form the switch models of transistors. The method presented in this paper, unlike the abstraction methods, can emulate many important features of switch-level models, such as bi-directional signal propagation and variations in driving strength. In order to attain a better utilization of FPGA resources a mixed-mode emulation approach has been used. In this approach parts of the circuit are emulated at the switch-level while the remaining parts of the circuit are emulated at the gate-level. The experimental results show that the presented emulation-based approach could be significantly faster than existing simulation-based approaches. The analytical performance estimation shows that the speed-up grows with the circuit size and is workload dependent.