Wind River (News - Alert) Simics is described by company officials as a full system simulator, intended for software developers to use to simulate any target hardware from a single processor to large, complex, and connected electronic systems.

This importance of such simulation is that it lets the target software -- board support package, firmware, real-time operating system, middleware, application, whatever -- run on a virtual platform the same way it does on the physical hardware. Any problems or bugs can be identified before it’s out there in the real world.

And when it’s on a virtual environment, according to Wind River officials, your engineering, integration, and test teams can use approaches and techniques “that are simply not possible on physical hardware.”

Developers can freeze, save, email, and restore the whole system. They can view and modify every device, register, or memory location. They can run the whole system in reverse to find the source of a bug. Pretty cool, huh?

Using Simics, companies can also adopt new approaches to the product development life cycle. These can reduce project risks and development costs, and improve both product quality and engineering efficiency.

“Full system simulation” means Wind River Simics simulates much more than a single processor, system-on-chip, or board -- “full system.” That means it can simulate the entire system, yes, all the way from a single platform up to racks of platforms, “with each running different operating systems on different processor architectures,” company officials say.

This means, among other advantages, real software loads run fast enough for everyday application-level analysis, testing, and debugging, and you get visibility into any target device, register, memory location, or other state, regardless of whether it is visible to a JTAG port or an agent-based software debugger.  

In May TMC (News - Alert) had the news that Wind River introduced Simics 4.6, described by company officials at the time as “a full system simulator that allows developers to transform the way they develop, debug, and test electronic systems by enabling them to simulate the functional behavior of their target hardware, from a single processor to large, complex, and connected electronic systems.”

The newest version of Simics introduced the capability to debug software applications that expand over multiple boards, increases team collaboration, and enables target system visualization and surveillance.

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