Comment by marshray

The 'edit-compile-run-debug' cycle is so expensive, chip design is all about simulation.

Chip vendors, and the tools they use to design them, actually do a significant amount of work for error cases. This is important not just for correctness, but for production yield, reliability, temperature and radiation hardness, etc. As chips get larger and more dense this becomes more and more important.

Single Event Upset (where one bit flips) is an example of the type of error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_event_upset