[variaga]

Of the half-dozen semiconductor- designing companies I've worked for, all of them used FPGAs for emulation.

- modern FPGAs are huge.

- when an asic design won't fit in a single FPGA, it's usually possible to partition the design into multiple FPGAs

- software emulation/ simulation is not guaranteed to be "more accurate". FPGAs can interact with a real-world environment in ways that simulation simply cannot

- simulations run 1000s of times slower than FPGAs. Months of simulation time can be covered in minutes on the FPGA

Edit: to be clear, they all use simulation too, but FPGAs are used to accelerate the verification process

[GeorgeTirebiter]

Is that still true in 2020? Or is the simulation getting good enough to skip the FPGA prototyping phase?

[brandmeyer]

Its still very much true. ASIC designs are described as massively parallel tiny communicating sequential processes. FPGA's are also extremely fine-grained CSP, to a degree that is much finer than anything a CPU can produce today.