After a rather long break, we finally had another Computer and System Architecture Unraveled meetup. This time, we had two speakers talking about virtual platforms. Fredrik Larsson from the Simics team at Intel addressed pre-silicon use cases, and Jakob Engblom from the VLAB Works team at Cadence (i.e., myself) talked about uses in Automotive and embedded (mostly post-silicon).
New Location
The location changed compared to previous meetups (which took place in the Kista Science Tower). From this point on, we are likely to host the meetups in the Electrum building in Kista. It is actually a location from the A Working Space service offered by Akademiska Hus, same location as the Kista Semiconductor Arena.
The room is in the corner of the building on the second floor, facing out towards the courtyard (where we happen to have the offices for both the evening’s speakers).
Virtual Platforms
I have been working with virtual platforms since 2002, and I have written quite a few blog posts and papers and done innumerable presentations on the topic. In the meetup, Fredrik provided the basic explanation of what they are, leaving me to talk more about use cases and the specifics of VLAB.
Fredrik covered the Intel Simics virtual platform, which I worked with until about a year ago. It was quite fun to see many of my old slides being presented by him 😊. He talked about how Simics works internally including details on the instruction-set simulator generator called simgen. Simgen was originally created by Fredrik for his Master’s Thesis back in the late 1990s!
Fredrik talked about Simics features and the use cases for the simulator for pre-silicon work at Intel. In short, there is a lot system integration being done on virtual platforms at Intel long before the silicon tapes out.
Talking about instruction-set simulation techniques, we had a rather long discussion on how to simulate a “same-on-same” target. I.e., the Simics technology called VMP that runs x86 target using virtualization on an x86 host. It came as a surprise to most present that the same is going in Arm land, thanks to the increasing availability of Arm-based cloud servers.
Automotive
I spent my time talking more about the use cases for virtual platforms in embedded and automotive. In short, virtualization offers convenience and capabilities that are hard to get with hardware development platforms.
One particular aspect of automotive development is the extensive use of federations of simulators to build very ambitious digital twins (as illustrated above). Different types of simulators are needed in order to provide a way to both run the software and integrate it with the vehicle and the world in which the vehicle operates.
The automotive ecosystem surrounding VLAB is also a lot more complex than for Simics. There are chip companies, Tier1s that build boards or ECUs, and OEMs that build actual vehicles. In addition, there are also software tools to integrate with and runtime software to support.
History…
The meetup had a fair share of historical looks back, in particular related to Simics. The Simics simulator started life in the very same building where we had the event, at the research institute that was then called SICS. Today, SICS is part of RI.SE, but they are still in the same offices as they used back in 1990 (from what I understand, first time I went there must have been in the late 1990s).
The Simics team eventually spun out into the Virtutech company and moved to downtown Stockholm. The company moved a few times before it was acquired by Intel. Eventually, the Simics team was moved out to the main Intel office in Kista which is in a building right next to Electrum.
There was also a previous Simics user in the audience who showed off a Virtutech-era Simics t-shirt!
Final Words
This blog post is a bit shorter than usual, since I was a speaker myself and thus reporting on it makes less sense. I have also written so much about virtual platforms in the past that it seems silly to repeat myself.
Future CaSA Events
To learn about future CaSA events, check the new Google Groups group. The old Meetup site is being retired.