EMPAR: an interactive synthesis environment for hardware emulations

In this paper, we present EMPAR, an interactive synthesis environment for hardware emulations. EMPAR provides an open-ended design environment for the development of hardware emulators, which is capable of supporting: (1) a variety of EM architectures (2) a variety of EM synthesis algorithms, (3) interactive control by the user, and (4) design quality analysis. An X-window based graphical user interface has been developed to support a variety of interactive design tasks. The key features in EMPAR are: (1) it is open-ended so that arbitrary algorithms and tools can be built on top of it and (2) it is fully interactive and leaves the control to the designer. EMPAR can be used as a design environment for existing hardware emulators as well as a test bed for the evaluation and development of new hardware-emulator architectures and synthesis algorithms.