Abstract: In one aspect, the present invention overcomes the limitations of the prior art by provident a logic simulation ;system that uses a VLIW simulation processor with many parallel processor elements to accelerate the simulation of synthesizable tasks but that also supports non-synthesizable tasks and/or branching. In one approach, the VLIW simulation processor is based on an architecture that does not have an on-chip instruction cache. Instead, VLIW instruction words stream in directly from a program memory and the individual processor elements are programmed continuously based on the instruction words. This also allows the efficient implementation of side-entrance jumps, where a region of code can be entered in the middle of the region rather than always requiring entrance from the top. In another aspect, non-synthesizable tasks can be efficiently handled by exception handlers.

Abstract: A logic simulation processor uses multi-state logic (e.g., in 4-state, signals may take the values 0, 1, X or Z in the simulation of a semiconductor chip design). Typically a reduced number of basic multi-state logic functions are selected for the instruction set of the processor. Logic functions that are not part of the basic set are simulated by constructing them from combinations of the basic logic functions. In this way, the instruction length remains a manageable size but all logic functions that may occur can be simulated. The basic VLIW architecture can be extended to other applications.