Wind River Simics Simics allows companies to become Table of Contents Networks and Buses ......................4 more competitive by enabling improved Target RTOS Support .....................4 Optimize Your Entire Product product capability and quality while Life Cycle .............................................2 Capabilities ....................................5 reducing technical risk, schedule risk, and development cost across the full Platform Engineering .....................2 Modeling ........................................5 product development life cycle. Application Development ..............2 Host Support ..................................5 System Integration and Test ..........3 Target Support ....................................5 Simics virtual platforms can be as complex or as simple as your actual Project Management ......................3 Target Devices ................................5 physical hardware. They can contain Quick and Efficient Modeling ..............4 Target CPU Architectures ...............5 multi-core processors, multiple processor Features and Capabilities ....................4 SoC Families ...................................6 boards, or multiple-board systems. This Scalability .......................................4 Commercial Board Virtual provides the ability to debug your Connectivity/Interface ...................4 Platforms ........................................6 system as a whole, instead of just debugging individual pieces. Simics virtual platforms can contain a mix of Wind River Simics allows product teams to hardware for software development and different target hardware architectures, adopt a development methodology where testing. Simics virtual platforms are including mixed endian architectures. physical system hardware is replaced by unique. They are fast and accurate enough Simics virtual platforms eliminate Simics virtual platforms running on a to run a full software stack from hypervisor problems associated with using physical workstation or a PC. The virtual platform to application, and they guarantee hardware for product development such can run the same binary software as the repeatable software execution, full as limited target availability, flaky physical hardware and is fast enough to visibility/control of the virtual target prototype hardware, and hardware be used as an alternative to physical hardware, and true reverse execution. delays. Simics improves a project’s workflow by • Executable specification supporting true iterative development, • Scalable from single hands-on system architecture investiga- board to many boards tions, and the ability to begin software • Fast enough to run real development independent of hardware software loads • Mixed CPU architecture • Utilize virtual availability. By taking advantage of systems Define development system Simics as a consistent platform through- • Multi-core • Run the same binaries out the development process, teams are • Networking used by physical hardware able to improve their entire product • Save, share, restore development life cycle to shorten Deploy Develop complete system time-to-market and customer adoption. states Overall expenses are lowered and a • Force system fault conditions higher-quality product is delivered to the • Virtual platform • Execute in reverse to • Interim virtual platforms market place, increasing the satisfaction find source of bugs for early user feedback of your customers. • Demos, training, and tech support Figure 1: Wind River Simics supports the full product life cycle Optimize Your Entire Product Life Cycle The entire product development team—including hardware architects, hardware designers, software designers, software testers, system integrators, and system testers—can utilize virtual platforms. Virtual platforms also reduce costs of technical support activities when you need to maintain unique variants of hardware for each of your customers. In addition, virtual platforms can be used by sales and marketing teams to demonstrate new product capability and by customers for training purposes. What Simics Can Do for You Figure 2: Debugging software with Wind River Simics Define System Architecture • Leave paper behind and create an Platform Engineering access to physical hardware. Because a “executable specification.” The platform engineering team is virtual platform is entirely software • Make design decisions: How many comprised of hardware architects, configurable, it evolves much faster than CPUs? DSP or GPP? Cache size? hardware designers, and low-level physical hardware. This allows architec- Which software optimizations? software developers. The platform ture investigations and foundation software to be completed much earlier Develop Software engineering team defines and creates the product’s hardware architecture, than would be possible with traditional • Eliminate scheduling problems development approaches. due to limited target hardware system design, and foundation software. availability. In contrast to the paper trail that has Application Development • Perform “impossible” debugging. been traditionally used during the • Send a bit-exact system snapshot architecture phase, virtual platforms The application development team file to another developer for enable a hands-on resolution of technical architects, writes, optimizes, and tests collaboration. issues: software. Application development can • Say goodbye to “nonrepeatable be challenging when bugs.” • Use multi-core, accelerators, or both? • Eliminate big-bang integration: • Execute a function in GPP or DSP? • Key portions of the application come Start early and integrate progres- • What memory size and speed? from different development teams. sively. • Access to prototype hardware, debug The creation of a system’s foundation • Improve quality by testing tools, or instruments is limited. software—firmware, boot code, operat- hardware corner cases. • Debugging a single application requires ing system, and device drivers—can • Develop software applications access to the entire system. across heterogeneous OS environ- quickly become challenging if • Some bugs are only visible when run on the complete system. ments and hardware architectures. • Hardware is not yet available or • Bugs previously observed are not easily prototypes are not reliable. repeatable. Deploy Virtual Platforms • The hardware spec keeps changing. • You are developing multi-core applica- • Deploy virtual platforms to support • It is not possible to access key device tions. field teams. registers. • Demo your system on a laptop. Simics has supported application develop- The Simics virtual platform evolves with • Support new customer configura- ment on simulated systems comprised of the hardware design ensuring that tions easily and inexpensively. more than 50 boards and 700 processors, developers remain productive without 2 | Wind River Simics Traditional Product Life Cycle Product Life Cycle with VSD Resources Reduced Time-to-Market Software Increased Revenue Software Engineering Resources Engineering Resources Hardware Integration Hardware Integration and Test and Test Time Time Figure 3: Wind River Simics reduces time-to–market, compared to traditional product development including multi-core systems, heteroge- System Integration and Test engineer has only to freeze the system neous designs, multi-OS, and network System integration and test tasks can and send the checkpoint file to the distributed systems. Simics provides introduce significant risks to the success- software engineering team for guaran- complete control of hardware and time, ful delivery of the product, especially if teed bug duplication and subsequent support for seemingly impossible debug correction. • The hardware is late but the delivery scenarios, and complete run-to-run deadline has not moved. repeatability. As a result, individual • Tests cannot be completed due to lack Project Management developers and application teams work of target hardware. Project managers focus on higher-level more efficiently through the ability to • A hardware glitch interrupts tests, aspects of a program to ensure success- share system snapshots and to work with costing hours to restart or redo. ful completion and delivery of their the same compile/link/debug tools that • System faults cannot be forced without products: they are accustomed to using on physical physically breaking the hardware. target hardware. • Bugs do not reproduce themselves from • Design reviews run-to-run. • Hardware/software team collaboration A Simics virtual platform makes it much and communications easier to force, find, repeat, isolate, and When a virtual platform is used, integra- • Improved quality kill bugs by doing the following: tion can begin much earlier in the • Looming delivery deadlines development process. Now “integration” • Risk reduction • Running the same binaries that work on moves from a single high-profile task on the physical target Traditional development approaches, the Gantt chart to an evolving lower-risk • Freezing, saving, and restoring Simics where the hardware team moves on to activity that progresses forward as systems snapshots the next project immediately upon software becomes available. This progres- • Leveraging full visibility and control of delivery of the platform, can result in every device, register, and communica- sive integration approach can identify schedule delays, loss of features, or tions interface (e.g., Ethernet, virtual system problems much earlier than rework because the engineering