Intel® Simics® Simulator for Intel® FPGAs: User Guide

ID 784383
Date 4/01/2024
Public

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Document Table of Contents

1. About This Document

Updated for:
Intel® Quartus® Prime Design Suite 24.1
The Intel® Simics® Simulator for Intel® FPGAs User Guide describes the components and inputs of the Intel® Simics® Simulator for Intel® FPGAs and how to use it to simulate the Intel FPGAs so you can test your software early on in the development process.

The Intel® Simics® model of FPGA devices, along with their associated virtual platforms, are used to simulate the corresponding hardware. The model and virtual platform provide you with a way to exercise your software in early stages of the development process, but you can also use simulation as part of the continuous integration process.

The Intel® Simics® simulator is a full-system simulator mainly targeted to support the software development process. To do so, the Intel® Simics® simulator provides a set of capabilities that includes hardware and software inspection, dynamic system configuration, hardware modeling tools, scripting, and a rich set of other features. Unlike many other virtual machine products, Intel® Simics® simulator does not focus on being a hardware replacement, although it can be used in that way.

Use this document as a common starting reference guide to discover the features and capabilities that this tool offers. This document describes the concepts needed to understand what Intel® Simics® simulator and a Virtual platform are and how this can help in the development process.

This document also provides a step-by-step guide on how to use the simulator starting from installing the tool to launching a simulation and interacting with it through either a command line or a GUI. This document provides a large variety of examples that show you how to take advantage of this tool.

This document does cover aspects specific to any Intel FPGA device, but instead focuses on general areas that are common among the different platforms. There can be some cases in which certain features apply to one platform but not to another or vice versa. In each one of these cases, this document explains why.

Note: Only part of an Intel FPGA device is modeled for the Intel® Simics® simulator.
Note: The examples presented in this document were exercised with an early version of a virtual platform and device model. If you try to reproduce the examples from this document, you might see different results.