Intel opens up its Simics virtual FPGA platform
Intel has opened up its Simics internal FPGA virtual platform simulation for the first time.
The Simics Simulator for Intel FPGA is now public on the Intel Website, opening up a technology that has been used internally to develop software prior to silicon to use Intel’s Agilex 5 SoC FPGA E-Series.
The technology, initially called a full-system simulator, was created in the early 1990s as part of research into future multiprocessor architectures at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), which is now a part of RISE, the Research Institute of Sweden. It was acquired with Wind River in 2009 but Intel sold Wind River in 2018 and the technology has been used internally since.
The Simics Virtual Platform is initially available for Intel’s Agilex 5 SoC FPGA E-Series. The virtual platform matches the architecture defined in the Quartus Prime project Golden Hardware Reference Design (GHRD).
The opening up is key as the Intel Agilex 5 SoC FPGA E-Series has an all-new Hard Processor System (HPS), consisting of a dual-core Arm Cortex-A76 and a dual-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor, integrated with a system memory management unit that enables system-wide hardware virtualization through a unified memory model.
The design of the HPS allows hardware virtualization to be extended to peripherals instantiated in the FPGA SoC’s programmable-logic fabric and the creation of a Virtual Platform for early software development.
The FPGA Fabric Design corresponds to the model of the logic that is implemented in the FPGA fabric. This is not implemented as a single component, but instead, each one of the modules included in this model is instantiated individually.
The soc_inst corresponds to the view of the design being modeled and corresponds to the system seen from the Intel Platform Designer under the GHRD (qsys_top instance). Under this component are instantiated components such as the HPS sub-system and the FPGA Fabric design.
The Simics Simulator Core oversees the Simics simulator including the simulation engine and provides simulation services through the Simics API.
The virtual platform is a model of the hardware components, such as memories and flash devices, port devices, being simulated. This is the model of the virtual platform that simulates the real hardware specification over which the real target software can be executed.
The simulator infrastructure is integrated with a Python interpreter, RiscFree IDE and service node.
There is also a model of a board that contains an E-Series device. This model integrates the FPGA model with board components such as flash devices (SD Card, QSPI, NAND), USB disks, Ethernet PHY, and connectors as well as a model that represents the complete system. This instantiates the board component and any other component not included in the board component.
The virtual platform includes a wrapper called target script, in which the system component is instantiated. In this script, the values of user-configurable parameters are defined. Also, any initial simulation setup and any automation task are performed here.
www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/fpga/development-tools/simics-virtual-platform.html
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