Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
DVCon Europe 2025 took place on October 14 and 15, with the SystemC Evolution Day on the 16th. I was there, running around talking to people, taking photos, and listening to presentations. Just like it usually is. Great conference, great fun, great learning! The conference dinner was back by popular demand, and there was a lot of virtual platforms.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2025 – Virtual Platforms and a Real Party”
As noted previously, the Public Release of the Intel Simics Simulator has added a simple RISC-V virtual platform.
In my second blog post about the platform, I reconfigure the instruction set, crash Linux, debug the issue, and reconfigure the software to match the hardware.
The 2022 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference was back in physical form at its usual venue at the Holiday Inn München. It was a great conference, and just like at the 2022 DAC people were very happy to be back in person.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2022. Verification, System Simulation, and People!”I presented a tutorial about the “verification of virtual platforms models” at DVCon Europe last week. The tutorial was prepared by me and Ola Dahl at Ericsson, but Ola unfortunately could not attend and present his part – so I had to learn his slides and style and do my best to be an Ola stand-in (tall order, we really missed you there Ola!). The title maybe did not entirely describe the contents – it was more a discussion around how to think about correctness and in particular specifications vs implementations. The best part was the animated discussion that we got going in the room, including some new insights from the audience that really added to the presented content.
Updated: Included an important point on software correctness that I forgot in the first publication.
Continue reading “Notes from our DVCon Europe 2022 Tutorial”
DVCon (Design and Verification Conference) Europe is coming up in early December, in person, in München, Germany. The selection of papers and posters is finished, and the program is firming up. I am happy to report that I am part of two items on the menu, a personal record for DVCon! For more on DVCon Europe in general and how it has been in the past, see my previous blog post on DVCon Europe 2022.
Continue reading “Two Presentations at DVCON Europe 2022”
The SystemC Evolution Fika on April 7 had threading/parallelism as its theme. There were four speakers who presented various angles on how to parallelize SystemC models. The presentations and following discussion provided a variety of perspectives on threading as it can be applied in virtual platforms and other computer architecture simulations. It was pretty clear that the presenters and audience had quite different ideas about just what the target domain looks like and the best way to introduce parallelism to SystemC. Here is my take on what was said.
Continue reading “SystemC Evolution Fika: Parallel SystemC”The Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) Europe is going to be in-person in München again in 2022. After two years of virtual conferences, we are going back to the Holiday Inn where we have had so many great events in the past. The conference takes place on December 6 and 7. The call for papers, tutorials, and panels is out now, with a deadline in May!
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2022 – Come Join us in München in December”When discussing the design and integration of systems on chip and models of systems on chip, the Lego analogy is often brought up. The idea being that with Lego, anyone can put together anything and every component can be combined with all other components. Right. My recent building of Lego set 21327, Typewriter, makes me wonder if the people who talk about Lego-like construction have actually built anything from Legos in the past few decades.
Continue reading “Talking about Temporal Decoupling at DVCon Europe”
Integration is hard, that is well-known. For computer chip and system-on-chip design, integration has to be done pre-silicon in order to find integration issues early so that designs can be updated without expensive silicon re-spins. Such integration involves a lot of pieces and many cross-connections, and in order to do integration pre-silicon, we need a virtual platform.
Continue reading “Intel Blog Post: The More the Merrier – Integration and Virtual Platforrms”
In a blog post at Wind River, I describe how the Wind River Helix Lab Cloud system can be used to communicate hardware design to software developers. The idea is that you upload a virtual platform to the cloud-based system, and then share it to the software developers. In this way, there is no need to install or build a virtual platform locally, and the sender has perfect control over access and updates. It is a realization of the hardware communication principles I presented in an earlier blog post on use cases for Lab Cloud.
But the past part is that the targets I talk about in the blog post and use in the video are available for anyone! Just register on Lab Cloud, and you can try your own threaded software and check how it scales on a simulated 8-core ARM!
I have an article appearing in the latest issue of Elektronik i Norden, about using virtual platforms for multicore computer systems. It is framed in the context of the Freescale multicore push, in particular the QorIQ P4080, and addresses the common issues of debug, execution speed, and the need to zoom in on details every once in a while.