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Wind River Simics for Intel Architecture
Use Full System Simulation to Transform Your Product Life Cycle
Wind River Simics is a full system simulator used by software developers to simulate the functional behavior of target hardware systems. Referred to as a virtual platform, it can run the same unmodified target software as the physical hardware, including the same basic input-output system (BIOS), boot loader, operating system, middleware, and application.
With Simics, any size or complexity of electronic system can be simulated: from a single processor to multi-core, multiprocessor, multi-board, multi-rack, and networked systems.
Wind River offers many models of Intel devices, including the next-generation communications platform from Intel, Crystal Forest. Models of other next-generation Intel architecture devices will be available in the near future.
Why Use Wind River Simics?
Simics enables engineering, integration, and test teams to adopt approaches and techniques that are simply not possible on physical hardware. For example, developers can freeze, save, email, and restore the whole system; they can view and modify every device, register, or memory location; and they can run the whole system in reverse to find the source of a bug.
Using Simics, companies can adopt new approaches to the product development life cycle, yielding both dramatic reduction in project risks and development costs, and improvement to both product quality and engineering efficiency.
Benefits include the following:
Reduce Risks
- Reduce risks associated with new technologies such as multi-core.
- Reduce risks from hardware availability delays.
- Reduce risks associated with large, complex systems that are comprised of many different boards and are networked together.
- Reduce risks associated with products that contain mixed target architectures and target real-time operating systems.
- Reduce the scheduling risk of show-stopper bugs.
Reduce Time-to-Market
- Reduce the time it takes between iterations of hardware prototypes.
- Identify and fix critical system bugs sooner.
- Begin software development before the first hardware prototype is available, or even before hardware design is complete.
- Begin system integration before all components of the system are available.
- Decrease the time it takes to reproduce a bug and identify its source.
- Create a software ecosystem even before a physical product is available.
Reduce Costs
- Replace labs of equipment with virtual targets.
- Reduce the number of iterations of hardware prototypes that are needed.
- Reduce the number of hardware prototypes needed by staff.
- Reduce costs associated with shipping physical hardware between development teams.
Improve Quality
- Reduce the time it takes to run regression tests by running them on multiple virtual platforms.
- Insert hardware faults to test for software robustness.
- Speed up or slow down virtual time to test for load-handling capabilities.
- Automate testing by using scripts.
- Easily maintain multiple customer configurations of the product to expedite troubleshooting and training.
- Ensure consistent hardware setups across an organization.
Improve Engineering Efficiency
- Find and fix bugs faster because you have complete control over your entire system.
- Become more productive with virtual target hardware on every engineer's desk.
- Optimize hardware/software co-development to produce higher-quality systems in less time.
- Equip every engineer with the development platform, or even the full system.
- Reduce engineering friction from working with inconvenient physical hardware.
- Share models, checkpoint files, and projects with any Simics users, regardless of their Simics host configuration.
- Bypass limitations of physical hardware by having complete visibility and control of the virtual target.
- Reliably reproduce bugs at any location, at any point in time, on any host.
Use Simics During All Phases of Your Product Life Cycle
Wind River Simics provides full product life cycle support. Use Simics for all phases of product development, from system architecture exploration to system design, board bring-up, application development, integration, testing, and post-development customer support, to the next generation of the product:
- Prototyping: Try before you build by using virtual platforms for prototyping.
- Board and system bring-up: Bring up BIOS, systems, and boards faster than with physical hardware.
- Target access for entire team: Provide a virtual platform of the entire system to every team member, even those geographically dispersed.
- More efficient debugging: Use unique features to debug your target more efficiently than with physical hardware.
- Fault injection: Inject hardware and system faults such as memory corruption, a bad Ethernet card, periodic reset, and intermittent network connectivity.
- System level testing and debugging: Test your product in the context of the complete networked system.
- Management of multiple hardware variants: Easily configure many different virtual hardware variants to support a diverse user base.
Key features include the following:
- Models of Intel architecture devices created by experts at Intel
- Ability to scale from one to hundreds of processors, from a single board to a complete custom heterogeneous system
- Control of virtual target time: stop, slow down, speed up, even reverse
- Repeatable and deterministic environment
- Record-and-replay system execution
- Symmetric/asymmetric OS installations
- Ability to run complete, unmodified software, including BIOS
- Simulation of Intel virtualization technologies
Extensive Simics Model Library for Intel Architecture Devices
Organizations using Simics across the full product life cycle are able to see significant reductions in risks, time-to-market, and costs. It also improves quality of the overall product and efficiencies of the various engineering teams.
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Request Your Evaluation
Wind River is happy to announce that it is accepting requests for free evaluations of Simics for Intel Next Generation Communication Platform, code named "Crystal Forest". With this evaluation, you will be able to run real target software applications on a simulation of the "Crystal Forest" virtual platform and try it out in a variety of different network configurations.
This evaluation is available to qualified registrants only. You must provide all required information requested below and must be an employee of a commercial OEM considering incorporating Crystal Forest into your design. Students, and persons not affiliated with a commercial company will not qualify. Furthermore, be aware that you will be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement prior to receiving the evaluation.
