Democratizing and Accelerating Hardware Verification with Software-Native Optimization

Hardware verification accounts for a substantial portion of chip development effort, and improving its efficiency remains an ongoing challenge. Traditional hardware verification emphasizes reuse of verification assets, while emerging software-based frameworks embed verification in generalpurpose programming languages to improve usability and attract a broader range of developers. However, these frameworks remain simulator-centric, relying heavily on simulator-controlled timing, transaction lifecycles, and observability, which limits further democratization and acceleration of verification. We present UnityChip Verification (UCV), a software-native verification platform that recenters event scheduling and control within an explicit software event loop while treating simulators as pluggable backends. UCV identifies and addresses three key challenges: the programming paradigm gap between software and hardware timing, the difficulty of composing established verification components, and the performance-debuggability tradeoff. Evaluation on XiangShan and RocketChip shows that UCV improves both acceleration and democratization. UCV delivers up to $25 \times$ faster runtime and 76% lower memory usage than Cocotb, and achieves 16.6% higher throughput when reusing existing components. In community deployments, newcomers with software backgrounds contributed meaningful verification artifacts, with 26.3% producing runnable tests and 11 collectively uncovering 30 previously unknown bugs, indicating that UCV significantly lowers the entry barrier and broadens participation.