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Electronicdesignshavebeengrowingrapidlyinbothdevicecountandfunctionality. Thisgrowthhasbeenenabledbydeepsub-micronfabricationtechnology, and fueled by expanding consumer electronics, communications, and computing markets. A major impact on the profitability of electronic designs is the increasing productivity gap. That is, what can be designed is lagging behind what the silicon is capable of delivering. The main cause of this productivity gap is the cost of design verification. Verification complexity grows faster than the design complexity, which in turn growsexponentially, asMoore’s Lawhassuccessfully predicted. Thisleads to theverificationcrisis,aphenomenonthathasbecomeeversofamiliarintoday’s Electronic Design Automation (EDA) landscape. Thereareseveralremedies,eachcomingfromdifferentaspectsofthedesign and verification process. The first is the movement to higher levels of abstraction, especially the emerging Electronic System Level (ESL) model. The key enablers include languages that capture system level behavior and facilitate testbench automation for high level verification. The second are the methodology changes, exemplified by assertion-based verification, andtestbench automation highlighted byconstrained randomsimulation. Both canfindspecialized constructs in, and are facilitated by, theESL modeling languages. The third is the advance of technology at the foundation of all the changes. Constrained random simulation, with robust constraint solving capability, is key to any practical testbench automation tool. The same fundamental solving techniques are also shared by formal verification tools in assertion-based verification. The formal semantics for assertions, now entrenched in the ESL languages,connectinterfaceconstraintsusedinconstrainedrandomsimulation, and properties monitored in both simulation and formal verification.