Virtutech, Inc., the leader in virtualized software development (VSD) solutions for electronic systems, today announced that its breakthrough hybrid simulation capability, which leverages its proven Simics® simulator platform, was awarded an “Editor’s Tech Choice Award” in the multicore category and a corresponding nomination for “Reader’s Tech Choice Award” by leading electronic design resource eg3.com. Voting for the eg3.com “Readers’ Tech Choice Award” is open through September 5, 2008, via the link: http://www.eg3.com/techchoice/.

“eg3.com’s ‘Tech Choice Awards’ are presented quarterly to technology innovators who truly bring the most critical ideas to the marketplace, prompting major technological gains in their respective industries,” said Jason McDonald, senior editor of eg3.com. “Profound advancements in multicore development, like Virtutech’s hybrid simulation capability, are industry-changing and necessary for the highly sophisticated multicore processors of today.”

Virtutech’s hybrid simulation capability solves the critical need for both software performance analysis and fast software development of electronics system when developing with multicore processors by supporting multiple levels of model abstraction.

The Virtutech hybrid simulation approach provides a fully reversible and deterministic simulation environment for easy experimentation with partitioning, parallelizing and optimizing systems and applications. Specifically, the approach allows engineers to analyze, debug, profile and execute their applications in a fast, TLM-based, functionally accurate model and then switch to the cycle-accurate model when they want to perform precise performance analysis on critical sections of their application. The Simics hybrid simulation capability was introduced in June 2008 at the Freescale Technology Forum, and the first implementation supports Freescale Semiconductor’s advanced eight-core QorIQ™ P4080 processor.

“The hybrid simulation capability of the Virtutech Simics platform speeds development targeting our eight-core Freescale QorIQ P4080 processor, giving customers the ability to jumpstart product creation even before availability of first silicon,” said Kamal Khouri, NSD Ecosystem Solutions Manager for Freescale. “Virtutech deserves recognition for its innovations and advancements in the embedded multicore industry.”

“The eg3.com ‘Editor’s Tech Choice Award’ and ‘Reader’s Tech Choice Award’ nomination are timely recognition of Virtutech’s dedication to solve the complex issues involved in multicore adoption,” said Michel Genard, vice president of marketing at Virtutech, Inc. “Both the new hybrid simulation capability and our recently announced Simics Accelerator™, which boosts performance and scalability, are designed to enable software developers to fully leverage the multicore architecture available of their host environment or in their embedded target.”