The Simics product family is made up of multiple products and optional add-on products. For clarity the products are grouped into tools products and model products. This section defines what these products are and how they interact with each other. Please contact your Simics provider for the licensing terms of each product.
Features presented in this document may not always be supported for all architectures, for all target software and on all hosts.
Simics is the primary product in the family. It provides the core simulation engine and user interface. With Simics, users can set up, run, control and inspect the virtual target system. User-written models and user-written extensions and fault injectors can run in Simics without those products available or installed.
The primary functions of Simics are the simulator itself with hardware-level inspection capabilities, the ability to save and restore checkpoints, record-replay functionality, snapshots, breakpoints, scripting, host connections (aka real networking), and simulation performance monitoring. Checkpoints contain the complete state of the system, thus when you save a checkpoint you are saving the entire state of the system, including the processors, devices, and all the software. When you restore a checkpoint, you begin executing from the exact place where you stopped executing when you saved that checkpoint.
Simics offers a fully featured command line which enables scripting of all Simics commands in CLI and Python. Simics also supports non-intrusive platform level debug or standalone debuggers such as the Intel* System Debugger, and the GNU Debugger (GDB) which connect to agents running on the virtual board to support application debug.
Simics Analyzer is a part of the Simics product which provides analysis and debugging capabilities for software applications for large distributed and heterogeneous systems as well as less complex systems. Information is primarily accessed via GUI views, as well as being accessible from the Simics command-line. The primary functionalities of Analyzer are Source Code Debugger, OS Awareness, Full System Process List, System Execution Time Line, and Code Coverage. More details can be found in the Feature List document. Simics Analyzer is a system-level debugger that provides debug across all targets in a Simics session. Simics Analyzer can debug heterogeneous systems from a single debug view, including different target architectures and operating systems.
While Simics provides a hardware-centric view of the system, Simics Analyzer extends this to a software-centric view. At its most basic Simics Analyzer extends the assembly level debug of Simics with stack frames and local variables. On supported architectures (ARM, Intel, PPC, and MIPS) this can be extended to source level debug for single context systems such as boot code and OS kernels. Source level debug can be extended to multi-context systems through the use of OS awareness. OS awareness, which must be enabled for each combination of Operating System and CPU type, is provided for most Wind River Operating Systems and Linux with many Simics Model Products, see the associated Target Guide for supported combinations. Users can enable OS awareness for additional Operating Systems using Simics Model Builder. Simics Analyzer requires no instrumentation or other changes to the target code.
Simics Model Builder is an add-on product in the Simics Family. Simics Model Builder allows users to create and modify the device models, virtual boards, and systems that Simics runs. Additionally it lets users adapt and extend Simics with new capabilities, allowing for customization, expanded use cases and integration into other tooling environments.
Simics Model Builder provides access to the Simics API documentation and frameworks needed to build device models, components, and system configurations in DML, C, C++, SystemC, Python, and any other language that can be compiled to a C-language API. The API includes frameworks for common types of devices such as PCI, I2C, and Ethernet. The Device Modeling Language (DML) allows device models to be created quickly and efficiently by providing appropriate constructs for common modeling tasks such as register banks, bit fields, and endianness. Additionally, Simics Model Builder includes a kit for creating target system panels.
Simics Model Builder includes a SystemC Library that provides the ability to use SystemC TLM models within Simics, and to build SystemC models into Simics modules that can be run in Simics. SystemC Library-based models support most Simics CLI and GUI inspection features in the same way as models written directly for Simics. The SystemC Library supports SystemC 2.3, TLM-2.0, and both AT and LT-style SystemC models.
Simics supports running SystemC models, but because C++ does not have a standardized ABI, all SystemC Library modules as well as all SystemC models to be run inside Simics need to be compiled with exactly the same compiler, compiler version, and compiler flags. It works perfectly fine to include binary SystemC models as long as they are Accellera compliant and the compiler guidelines just outlined are followed.
Simics does not guarantee that the Simics SystemC Library API will not change between releases. Simics’ SystemC support is still being gradually improved and a completely frozen API would limit what improvements can be made. A lot of effort will, however, be made to avoid changing the API. If a change is needed, the end-user effort will be minimized.
Simics Virtual Platforms model the functionality of real or imagined hardware and are required for useful operation of a Simics Tools product. A Simics Virtual Platform can be as simple or complex as the physical target system is. It can contain anything from a simple CPU and RAM, to a complex single board computer containing a multi-core processor, to a personal computer with graphics, disk drives, and mouse, or even to a complex network of computers and systems. Simics Virtual Platforms can connect to other Simics Virtual Platforms or to the real world via networks like Ethernet.
Simics Virtual Platforms are comprised of a combination of model Components, Processor/SoCs models, and device models. Simics Virtual Platforms may not model all possible functionality of the hardware as models are frequently written to support the needs of a specific Operating System or set of Operating Systems. Simics Virtual Platforms are often referred to as “targets”.
A Simics Quick-Start Platform or QSP includes a model of a generic machine with a real core. The point of the QSP is to enable basic simulation of code that is Architecture and OS dependent, but BSP independent. The set of devices provides what an OS requires to execute: interrupt controller, system controller, timers, memory, serial connection, Ethernet, real-time clock, disk and flash. The devices are PC compatible with x86 QSP. The QSPs include board support packages (BSP) that enable operating systems to run on the QSP.
A Simics Platform (Model Library) is an add-on product to Simics that provides a collection of device models that a user can add to a Simics Virtual Platform using Simics Model Builder.