With the complexity of today’s software the length of workloads to validate hardware and software has increased to 100s of billions of cycles. As teams adopt a software-first validation strategy, modern emulation and prototyping platforms are needed to enable the highest performance as well highly efficient debug technology. In this two part tutorial (part 1: emulation, part 2: prototyping) we will use a multi-processor design case study to illustrate how emulation with ZeBu® EP1 emulation system and HAPS®-100 FPGA prototyping are ideal platforms to achieve software-first system validation. We will show how to rapidly identify design issues using emulation and run extremely long scenarios to find the deep cycle issues using prototyping.