At Wind River, Simics Beats the Real Thing!

Do you know any software engineers? Do you know any of the kind that lives and thrives in the land where software meets hardware….. you know, the land where bugs are creepy, slopes are slippery, and the code you build is actually rocket science? Those are the kind of software engineers we have at Wind River. And I can tell you, they are a tough crowd to please. When software goes into “things that truly matter,” the machines and systems our lives depend on every day, engineers tend to become extremely picky with what tools and methods they use. There can be no compromise on their code, and they must have high standards when it comes to what they need to do their job.

Therefore, nothing makes me more proud than saying that these guys – love Simics. So much that they not only use it, they depend on it to overcome “the matrix of pain” (or how to cover a very large test matrix, where for example all possible combinations of hardware configurations, OS versions, processor architectures, compilers and use cases, are included). Not only that, they use it for  a variety of other challenges like setting up an IoT capacity test lab, or debugging extremely complex code.

I have had the pleasure of talking to many Wind River engineers that light up with a smile when they hear I represent the Simics product line – “cool technology” they say. And I have heard many anecdotal stories of how Simics have helped with this and that problem, and how project leaders who said Simics saved the project, etc. So we thought…. let’s share this internal story with the external world. We interviewed a couple of teams that have been using Simics for a few years, and we documented it in a Wind River case study. Take a look and see for yourself.

Perhaps the biggest value, captured in this story, is how Simics reduces the time that teams have spent  and the resources used for testing (which is where the famous ”matrix of pain” appears). But let’s not overlook the other benefits covered in the story, like cool debugging techniques and saving millions in lab costs.

But don’t just take our word for it, check out  other examples demonstrating how Simics have helped companies save significant time and money. For example, AdaCore recently told their story of how Simics helps to run 60,000 tests in 24 hours. If you build your own hardware, you may be interested in how Simics can help drive hardware design to make it better aligned with software needs; and in this case check out how Intel uses Simics. And if you’re up for some video watching while having a cup of coffee, take a look at this blog post and check out the 3 minute video an aerospace-defense customer created about their Simics use.

There are a variety of things Simics can help with, so summarizing it is not easy, but maybe the first sentence in our own story says it well: “The maxim “nothing beats the real thing” has been put to test at Wind River. “ At Wind River, Simics does beat the real thing!