Virtutech Announces Simics Full-System Checkpointing for SystemC Based Transaction-Level Modeling

Virtualized Systems Development Platform Provides Full Support for Multiple Modeling Languages

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Jul 27, 2009 --  Virtutech®, Inc., the leader in virtualized systems development (VSD), today announced that Virtutech’s Simics® platform now provides full-system checkpointing for SystemC™ based transaction-level modeling (TLM). OEM and semiconductor developers now can save, restore and share the precise and full-system state to bypass lengthy system boot and restart steps, share the system among engineering team members, capture and duplicate bugs, parallelize testing and offer product training from virtual platforms.

Virtutech is the only vendor to enable full-system, mixed-architecture checkpointing that reaches far beyond a simple save and restore function for individual elements of a SystemC virtual platform. The Simics checkpoint captures a snapshot of the complete system and can be restored at any point or location, on any host and by anyone so that software development, integration or test efforts can continue as if they had never been interrupted. Simics checkpointing works with mixed modeling languages to enable unique capabilities such as language freedom, portability across model versions, differential saving of memory and disks, the ability to easily change the level of model abstraction and to archive multiple target setup configurations.

“As SystemC transitions towards becoming a more supported design language for ESL, full- system checkpointing for SystemC is one of the features that customers are beginning to expect and request from tool vendors,” said Mark Burton, managing director of GreenSocs Ltd. “Naturally, we are excited that Virtutech has now provided this capability within Simics. The use of checkpointing will increase model accuracy, development team productivity, and it is a feature that is critical to broadened adoption and use cases for SystemC models.”

In the past decade, checkpointing has become one of the most utilized and valuable capabilities within Virtutech Simics. The addition of SystemC checkpointing complements existing support for models written in C, C++ and Python to provide developers with a seamless, robust simulation solution for software, hardware and systems development bringing benefits that are difficult or impossible to achieve using physical hardware.

“We find that our customers are deploying increasingly complex mixed-architecture systems in combination with a variety of processors including CPUs, DSPs, ASICs and FPGAs,” said Michel Genard, vice president of marketing for Virtutech, Inc. “One of Virtutech’s competitive advantages is the ability for Simics to combine individual, checkpointable component models written in multiple languages within a full-system virtual platform.”

For further information, Virtutech executives will be available at the DAC conference taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from Sunday, July 26 through Friday, July 31, 2009. Jakob Engblom, technical marketing manager, and Ross Dickson, principal technology specialist, both from Virtutech, will be discussing a jointly authored paper in the session, “Design Flow for Embedded System Device Driver Development and Verification,” on Tuesday, July 28, from 4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., in room 132. Engblom will also be participating in the panel, “The Wild West: Conquest of Complex Hardware-Dependent Software Design,” on Thursday, July 30 in room 131.

About Simics

Simics is a high performance full-system simulator that enables engineers to develop, debug, test and run their entire software application stack on a virtual representation of their target hardware or virtual platform. The overall engineering development efforts are reduced through advanced capabilities normally not available with physical hardware: non-invasive debugging and tracing, saving and later resuming execution, full deterministic behavior, built-in networking capabilities, forward and reverse execution, ability to examine, control, and break on any internal device and to inject faults, and the ability to save system state and later replay it. Simics runs unmodified production-quality binaries and can be used with third party software development tools.

About Virtutech

Virtutech, Inc. is the leader in product development process improvement through virtualized systems development (VSD). Virtutech Simics® allows for a revolutionary change in the product development process at a full system level rather than a component level and is the only commercial solution that delivers the four most important criteria for successful deployment of hardware virtualization in the electronics equipment development process: speed, scalability, model availability, and control. Simics customers report reduced time to market, better project risk management, lower capital expenditure, product development cost and maintenance as well as increased quality and individual productivity. Virtutech serves the needs of the world’s leading OEMs in the high-performance computing, aerospace and defense, telecommunications, networking and semiconductor industries. Customers include Cisco, Ericsson, Freescale Semiconductor, GE Avionics, Honeywell, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Nortel, Northrop Grumman, MontaVista Software and Wind River. Virtutech is an active participant in organizations to drive adoption of VSD such as ARM Connected Community, Eclipse.org, IBM PartnerWorld, Multicore Association, Power.org, OSCI and Spirit Consortium. Virtutech is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. For more information, visit www.virtutech.com.