Next gen virtual platform simulator by Imperas and OVP Initiative extends simulation speed advantage by 50 percent

THAME, ENGLAND: Imperas, which through the Open Virtual Platforms (OVP) initiative has become the de facto source for instruction accurate processor modeling and simulation, has announced a major release of new technology.

Highlights of this June 2010 release are the virtual platform simulator OVPsim, which has improved its industry leading performance by 50 percent; fast models of PowerPC processors, and a MIPS-based reference platform under SystemC/TLM-2.0 which boots both Linux and Mentor Graphic’s Nucleus RTOS.

OVPsim, which for basic instruction set simulation of processors achieves over 2 billion instructions per second (or over 2,000 MIPS), achieves hundreds of MIPS performance for real world virtual platforms. ARM and MIPS-based virtual platforms can boot Linux in less than 5 seconds on a 2GHz laptop with OVPsim.

"Virtual platforms are providing significant benefits to our software team, as they make it easier to maintain existing software and develop new applications for existing avionics systems," said Dan Radke, USAF, 559th Software Maintenance Squadron.

"Key attributes of virtual platforms are realizing far greater speed of software simulation, especially for multiprocessor systems, having more standard approaches to develop models to, and being able to use open source models of processors and peripherals already available, making it easier for us to build our own efficient models of complete avionics systems."

The addition of the models of the PowerPC cores brings OVP to nearly 50 different models of processor cores, all running at very high speed, and all working with both the OVP and Imperas simulators. All OVP processor models are instruction accurate, and very fast, focused on enabling embedded software developers to have a development environment available early to accelerate the software development cycle.

Virtual platforms utilizing these OVP processor models can be created with the OVP peripheral and platform models, or the processor models can be integrated into SystemC/TLM-2.0 based virtual platforms using the TLM-2.0 interface available with all OVP processor models.

In addition to working with the OVP simulator, these models work with the Imperas advanced tools for multicore software verification, analysis and debug, including key tools for software development on virtual platforms, such as OS and CPU-aware tracing, profiling code analysis, and multicore debug.

“The first questions from our customers are always about simulation speed and model availability,” said Umesh Sisodia, founder and CEO of CircuitSutra. “Even before this release, OVP made it easy to answer those questions, but these additions to OVP for simulation speed, additional models and the TLM-2.0 reference virtual platform make OVP even easier to use and adopt.”

Reference virtual platforms provide a known good starting point for users looking to develop their own virtual platforms. OVP has released a reference virtual platform of the MIPS Malta board, running under SystemC/TLM-2.0, that boots either Linux or the Mentor Graphics Nucleus RTOS. This virtual platform can be used to understand the operating systems, since the virtual platform simulation can provide more visibility and controllability than just executing and debugging on the hardware itself.

The virtual platform can also be used for the development of applications running under Linux or Nucleus on a MIPS-based system. Moreover, the virtual platform is open source, and it’s easy to add peripherals to the virtual platform using SystemC/TLM-2.0 models and develop drivers for those peripherals.

“Our licensees are focused on speeding time-to-market and extracting the highest possible performance from their SoCs,” said Art Swift, vice president of marketing for MIPS Technologies. “Virtual platforms give users a head start in the development cycle. Having a virtual platform of a common development board running at real time speeds can potentially shave weeks or months off of a typical development cycle.”

“We founded OVP 2 years ago to provide the infrastructure technology – simulation and models – to the embedded software community,” said Simon Davidmann, president and CEO, Imperas and founding director of the OVP initiative. “Over this time we’ve seen the community – users, tool developers, processor IP vendors, service providers, academia – come together around OVP to help them with embedded software development. We're proud and excited to be part of this industry momentum, and to continue to contribute to OVP.”