Kuree / fsim

Fiber-based SystemVerilog Simulator.

fsim: Fiber-based SystemVerilog Simulator

fsim is a lightweight SystemVerilog simulator based on userland fibers. It leverages slang as a frontend to parse any SystemVerilog files. fsim is guided by the following design goals:

1. Concurrent and event-driven. Fine-grained multi-threading using fibers.
2. Performant. Compiles SystemVerilog into C++ code.
3. Fast to compile. Supports incremental and parallel builds builds via ninja.

How to install

The easiest way to install is via pip. Simply do

pip install fsim

Notice that for maximum compatibility, the Linux wheel is shipped with gcc, which allows xfim to be installed on any Linux system. macOS should work out of the box if the development tools are installed.

Development

To build from source, you can use the following commands. Notice that you also need ninja and clang-format installed in your environment path.

git submodule update --init
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make -j

Usage

Once fsim is installed, you should find fsim executable in your path. The usage is similar to other commercial simulators and C/C++ compilers. For instance, to run a simple testbench, we can do

fsim design.sv tb.sv

The command above will compile the SystemVerilog into an executable called fsim.out. You can override it with -o option. You can then start the simulation by running the executable. A working directory called fsim_dir is created to store compilation files.

To run the simulation automatically after the compilation, we can use -R flag, e.g.:

fsim -R design.sv tb.sv

This feature is simular to Incisive/Xcelium. Notice that if the files are unmodified, subsequent run will not trigger a new compilation.