HARDWARE MODELING SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SIMULATING PORTIONS OF ELECTRICAL CIRCUITS

摘要

A hardware modeling system (10) simulates portions of electrical circuits (16, 18) utilizing actual hardware components in the simulation. Access to these hardware modeling elements (16, 18) is provided on a shared basis to plural workstations (14). Simulation vectors for plural users may be stored discontiguously in a first memory (26) and a single user's vectors are transferred to a second memory (28) for streaming to the elements (16, 18). An optional timing analyzer and memory circuit (34) periodically samples outputs from pins of the hardware modeling elements to provide timing information on the response of such elements. High impedance testing and bus contention detection is performed on the pins of the hardware modeling elements. Clocking signals applied to the hardware modeling elements are adjustable and may be set at extremely high frequencies. A special gating circuit (292) accesses each pin of the hardware modeling elements and incorporates one or more of the above features.