Foreword

Simic is the brainchild of Aaron Ashkinazy and Gary Gendel. It combines many years of experience in gate level simulation starting with the RCA TESTGEN simulator. Henry Hellman authored pioneering work in fault and fault-free simulation and was supported and extended by Gary. The groundbreaking MIMIC logic simulator created by Aaron, Henry, and Gary followed TESTGEN. MIMIC ended the age of breadboard design in RCA. It also was the reason that the RCA ASIC division was created, and touted 99% first try working silicon right from the start. RCA told customers worldwide, "If MIMIC says it works then RCA guarantees it". In 1985, MIMIC won RCA's most prestigious award, the David Sarnoff Technical Excellence award. By the time GE sold the division to Harris Semiconductor, MIMIC was creating a new design every day for more than 60 companies globally.

Simic goes beyond the concepts built into MIMIC. It has features that no other gate-level logic simulator anywhere in the world has; with strengths in performance, accuracy, hazard detection, and interactive debugging. It is very comprehensive and highly customizable. In these pages, you will experience the breadth of its capability including support for asynchronous design, test equipment emulation, fault-free and fault analysis.

A Personal Commentary

To this day it amuses me how Simic can outperform commercial switch/gate/behavioral simulators in features, performance and accuracy. Some of these concepts improve performance several orders of magnitude with improved accuracy. We've been asked numerous of times to devulge how we did things. After all these years it's incredible that no one has figured them out.

Henry passed away before Simic became a reality. At that time he was investigating some novel concepts in automatic test pattern generation. The Ashkinazy-Hellman "discussions" were legendary in RCA. These pushed outside-of-the box thinking and moved the simulator in exciting ways. Aaron has been a co-worker, mentor, and friend since I joined the MIMIC team in 1981 until his passing. We worked, talked, laughed, and took lunchtime together continuously for 35 years. He never ceased to impress and inspire me with his wisdom in so many technical and non-technical domains. He was unassuming and countless times, hours after a conversation, I would realized how insightful he was. My continued effort on Simic and other projects I dedicate to Aaron. To this day I instintively reach for the phone to discuss something I'm working on. I still hear his voice and it makes me smile. He will be missed but never forgotten.

- Gary