Wind River to Launch Updated Simics Virtual Systems Development Solution

Wind River Simics 4.4 supports full system simulation and allows original equipment manufacturers to undertake critical software development activities on virtual platforms, independently of any hardware development schedules, semiconductor availability constraints or other limitations. Simics supports a variety of hardware architectures, including ARM®, Intel®, MIPS® and Power Architecture™, and can help semiconductor manufacturers redefine complex system-on-chip development with greater ecosystem support and customer engagement.

Primary new features of Simics 4.4 include the following:

* Wind River Simics Analyzer, a new tool that helps customers analyze and better understand the heterogeneous aspect of their designs, offers a graphical timeline with execution details of what process runs where and when for a complete software application stack. This is particularly useful for tracking multi-core development and applications spanning multiple CPU architectures or multiple operating systems.
* Simics Analyzer is designed to easily integrate with VxWorks and Wind River Linux as well as support other operating systems and tools environments to account for all manner of heterogeneous designs and enable full system simulation.
* Simics Analyzer includes statement code coverage on binary code, without modifying or instrumenting the target system code.
* Expanded support for running multiple models in parallel is included for C, C++, SystemC and DML. This makes Simics a simulation framework well suited for heterogeneous designs that can simulate foreign models not originally written for Simics.
* Wind River Simics Extension Builder helps developers to build profiling tools and other specialized analysis tools and data collections. It also provides a well-defined interface to the Simics simulator and allows developers to extend Simics with custom functionality (plug-ins) and connect Simics into additional workflows and enterprise tooling environments.
* With Simics Extension Builder, other simulators such as ISSes (instruction set simulators) from third parties can be integrated into Simics. Via a Simics CPU interface for processor models, users can expand their existing processor simulation to cover the entire target system.

Simics opens new horizons in traditional cross-development environments by enabling actual full-system simulation across any mix of target hardware, operating systems and tools customers choose to use. With Simics 4.4, customers can meet aggressive time-to-market deadlines, while reducing product development costs and increasing overall product quality, said Michel Genard, vice president of product strategy and marketing for Simics at Wind River. Wind River's portfolio of development and test solutions aims to remove the complexity associated with embedded software development by providing tools at all stages of the product development life cycle. This allows our customers to better and more quickly design quality software.

Development teams within semiconductor companies and systems companies primarily in the aerospace and defense and networking market segments have a mandate to meet increasingly accelerated development cycles and time-to-market schedules with limited resources. Many engineers are turning to virtual systems development or simulation development tools to generate significant savings across total cost of ownership and accelerate the delivery of higher-quality software and systems.

In February 2010, VDC Research1 released a report from their 2009 Embedded Software Market Intelligence Service that estimated Simics to be the market-leading virtual prototyping/simulation platform, with greater than 30 percent of total market revenue.