Simics is an efficient, instrumented, system level instruction set simulator.
Simics is a fast system-level virtual platform that can simulate any electronic system. It scales from single cores running firmware to very large heterogeneous multi-core multi-processor multi-board configurations.
Simics can simulate arbitrary systems including many different types of processors at once (such as big Intel cores along with embedded firmware engines, or networks containing ARM, Intel, and other types of SoCs). Simics is built to be fast, and for Intel-on-Intel it uses VT-x to reach speeds close to common virtual machine systems. Multiple networked machines can be simulated inside a single Simics simulation process, and run in parallel using multicore hosts.
Simics models include both processor cores and the peripheral devices, allowing the execution of unmodified real-world software including both boot-up firmware, BIOS and UEFI, and full software stacks including hypervisors.
The end uses for Simics include pre-silicon software development, debug, and testing, program analysis, computer architecture research, network simulation, and more. Simics has very powerful built-in instrumentation, tracing, inspection, and debug features that operate on the target software without disturbing its execution in any way. Simics applies to software at all levels: firmware, boot code, operating systems, drivers, hypervisors, and user-level applications.
Simics is developed by Intel, and also sold commercially by Wind River.
