Simics is a full-system simulator or virtual platform used to run unchanged production binaries of the target hardware. Simics was originally developed by the

Swedish Institute of Computer Science RISE SICS (previously Swedish Institute of Computer Science) is a leading research institute for applied information and communication technology in Sweden, founded in 1985. It explores the digitalization of products, services and businesses. In ...

(SICS), and then spun off to Virtutech for commercial development in 1998. Virtutech was acquired by

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

in 2010. Currently, Simics is provided by

in a public release and sold commercially by

Wind River Systems Wind River Systems, Inc., also known as Wind River (trademarked as Wndrvr), is an Alameda, California–based company, subsidiary of Aptiv PLC. The company develops embedded system and cloud software consisting of real-time operating systems sof ...

, which was in the past a subsidiary of Intel. Simics contains both

instruction set simulator An instruction set simulator (ISS) is a simulation model (abstract), model, usually coded in a high-level programming language, which mimics the behavior of a mainframe or microprocessor by "reading" instructions and maintaining internal variables ...

s and hardware models, and is or has been used to simulate systems such as

Alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter ''aleph'' , whose name comes from the West Semitic word for ' ...

, ARM (32- and 64-bit),

IA-64 IA-64 (Intel Itanium architecture) is the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the discontinued Itanium family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors. The basic ISA specification originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was subsequently implemented by ...

, MIPS (32- and 64-bit), MSP430,

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

( 32- and

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...

RISC-V RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five") is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. The project commenced in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley. It transfer ...

( 32- and

), SPARC-V8 and V9, and

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

and

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set architecture, instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new ope ...

CPUs. Many different operating systems have been run on various simulated virtual platforms, including

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

VxWorks VxWorks is a real-time operating system (or RTOS) developed as proprietary software by Wind River Systems, a subsidiary of Aptiv. First released in 1987, VxWorks is designed for use in embedded systems requiring real-time, Deterministic system, ...

, OSE, Solaris,

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

, QNX, RTEMS,

UEFI Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI, as an acronym) is a Specification (technical standard), specification for the firmware Software architecture, architecture of a computing platform. When a computer booting, is powered on, the UEFI ...

, and Zephyr. The

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was fork (software development), forked. It continues to ...

AMD64 port was initially developed using Simics before the public release of the chip. The purpose of simulation in Simics is often to develop software for a particular type of hardware without requiring access to that precise hardware, using Simics as a virtual platform. This can applied both to pre-release and pre-silicon software development for future hardware, as well as for existing hardware. Intel uses Simics to provide its ecosystem with access to future platform months or years ahead of the hardware launch. The current version of Simics is 6 which was released publicly in 2019. Simics runs on 64-bit x86-64 machines running

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and

(32-bit support was dropped with the release of Simics 5, since 64-bit provides significant performance advantages and is universally available on current hardware). The previous version, Simics 5, was released in 2015. Simics has the ability to execute a system in forward and reverse direction. Reverse debugging can illuminate how an exceptional condition or bug occurred. When executing an OS such as

in reverse using Simics, previously deleted files reappear when the deletion point is passed in reverse and scrolling and other graphical display and console updates occur backwards as well. Simics is built for high performance execution of full-system models, and uses both

binary translation In computing, binary translation is a form of binary recompilation where sequences of instruction (computer science), instructions are translated from a source instruction set (ISA) to the target instruction set with respect to the operating syste ...

and

hardware-assisted virtualization In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s with ...

to increase simulation speed. It is natively multithreaded and can simulate multiple target (or guest) processors and boards using multiple host threads. It has been used to run simulations containing hundreds of target processors.

References

External links

Simics public release from IntelSimics product page at Wind River
Virtualization software Virtual machines Debuggers Simulation software Emulation software Companies based in Silicon Valley {{emulation-stub

See also

References

External links