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Engineers can save themselves a lot of grief if they carefully evaluate their designs in software before committing to silicon or sheet metal. Model-based-design and early-verification tools are helping designers, whether they are developing ICs or airframes, find inevitable mistakes early and get to market on time. Model-based design can be of significant value in helping isolate domain experts, such as medical-device or aerospace engineers, from the need to understand low-level hardware and software details. However, they can also help catch errors at the specification stage that designers would not otherwise catch until the test stage, saving time and money. The available modeling and prototyping tools span the gamut of applications, from mechatronics systems to RTL (register-transfer-level)-IP (intellectual-property)-based SOCs (systems on chips). Model-based design and rapid prototyping can be particularly valuable in proof-of-concept work or in ensuring that a specification meets customer requirements.