Simics is used by software and system developers worldwide in a variety of industries.
Who Uses Simics?
Industries
Simics is being used by the telecom, networking, military/aerospace (including commercial avionics and space systems), high-performance computing, and semiconductor industries.
Engineering Disciplines
Simics is used by hardware architects to quickly prototype new boards/systems. By plugging in a new processor or device into an existing design, a hardware architect can determine the impact of the change quickly. In addition, the hardware architect can share this virtual prototype with the software team to get their early feedback as well.
Simics is used by low-level software developers for board bring-up activities including BSP, drivers, firmware development, and OS bring-up. By using Simics prior to hardware prototype availability, software developers can get a head-start on their work. In addition, by utilizing a virtual prototype, they can provide valuable, early feedback to the hardware team. The virtual prototype is also more stable than early prototype hardware, making it easier to decide whether an error is in software or hardware.
Simics is used by application-level developers to get a full virtual platform for doing software application development, debug, and test instead of developing on a small piece of the overall system or a reference board that does not actually match the custom target system. This provides a higher fidelity environment and allows application developers to detect and resolve problems that normally wouldn't be found until system integration. It also provides a more convenient and available system that is available on every engineer's desk, in any configuration, without booking time on a limited number of prototype machines.
Simics is also used by system integrators to integrate and test the complete system, regardless of it is a system of a few boards or a large system containing hundreds of networked computers. This entire range of target systems can be virtualized within Simics. System integrators also find it convenient to maintain a wide variety of system configurations virtually instead of having to manually recreating these configurations in lab environments as they are needed.
Simics is used post product development by sales staff, support staff, and training staff. Instead of hauling around heavy, fragile, complex equipment, these individuals can use a virtualized instance of their system for demo and training purposes.
Types of systems simulated
Simics is flexible. It can be used to simulate the simpliest of systems: a CPU with some memory. In addition, it can simulate devices on an SoC, or an entire board complete with external devices connected by RapidIO, PCI, PCI-express. In addition, Simics can simulate multiple boards connected via a backplane such as VME or communication bus such as ARINC 429, MIL/STD 1553, or Ethernet. Simics can also simulate extremely large systems (consisting of hundreds of boards or computers) connected via Ethernet networking.