Acceleration And Emulation – Why HW/SW Integration Needs Both

Acceleration, Emulation, and FPGA prototypes are most talked about these days and each has a distinctive role to play. In our earlier post we reflected on the Cadence rollout of Palladium XP, a verification computing platform that unifies acceleration capabilities from the Incisive Xtreme product line with Incisive Palladium emulation, incorporating some of the strongest capabilities from each platform.  You can read the press release here, but in his blog Richard Goering looks at the larger story behind the announcement. Why put acceleration and emulation in a single environment? What role does either play in hardware/software integration? And how do we define "acceleration" and "emulation," anyway?