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Boot a simulation

Introduction

There is an example hardware defintion + testbench :

//Your hardware toplevel
import spinal.core._
class TopLevel extends Component{
  ...
}

//Your toplevel tester
import spinal.sim._
import spinal.core.sim._

object DutTests {
  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
    SimConfig.withWave.compile(new TopLevel).doSim{ dut =>
      //Simulation code here
    }
  }
}

Configuration

SimConfig will return your a default simulation configuration instance on which you can call multiple function to configure your simulation :

Syntax	Description
withWave	Enable the simulation wave capture
withConfig(SpinalConfig)	Specify the SpinalConfig that should be use to generate the hardware
allOptimisation	Enable all the RTL compilation optimisation to reduce simulation time (will increase compilation time)
workspacePath(path)	Change the folder where the sim files are generated

Then you can call the compile(rtl) function to compile the hardware and warmup the simulator. This will return you a SimCompiled instance.

On this SimCompiled instance you can run your simulation with the following functions :

Syntax	Description
doSim[(simName[, seed])]{dut => …}	Run the simulation until the main thread is done (doesn’t wait forked threads) or until all threads are stuck
doSimUntilVoid[(simName[, seed])]{dut => …}	Run the simulation until all threads are done or stuck

For example :

val spinalConfig = SpinalConfig(defaultClockDomainFrequency = FixedFrequency(10 MHz))

SimConfig
  .withConfig(spinalConfig)
  .withWave
  .allOptimisation
  .workspacePath("~/tmp")
  .compile(new TopLevel)
  .doSim{ dut =>
  //Simulation code here
}

Note that by default, the simulation will work into the simWorkspace/xxx folders. You can override the simWorkspace location by setting the SPINALSIM_WORKSPACE environnement variable.

Running multiple tests on the same hardware

val compiled = SimConfig.withWave.compile(new Dut)

compiled.doSim("testA"){ dut =>
   //Simulation code here
}

compiled.doSim("testB"){ dut =>
   //Simulation code here
}

Throw Success or Failure of the simulation from a thread

At any moment during a simulation you can call simSuccess or simFailure to end it.