Reminds me of a passage from Tracy Kidders "Soul of a new Machine" [1]. The guys at Data General were implement one of the first pipelined 32bit processors for a mini computer in the late 70's. In the book Kidder talks about how they had a gate level simulator implemented in software that allowed them trouble shoot timing issues. Makes me wonder if a similar simulator could be useful to test and/or debug these types of issues.

Great book, highly recommend it. It won the Pulitzer.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine