Reading simulation time to a variable

Hi Pedro.

The "time" command lets you report the current time, as well as doing math operations on time values. Refer to the Xcelium Tcl docs.

xcelium> time

0 FS

xcelium> time ns

0 NS

xcelium> set now [time ns]

0 NS

xcelium> puts $now

0 NS

xcelium> 

Is there a way to read the time value while the script is running using interruptions?

Imagine that I want to use the command time and clock every 10seconds. Is that possible?

Pedro

There's no built-in way to set a real-time breakpoint, but it could be done by writing some C code to set an OS timer interrupt and some VPI code to get the timestamp and print it.

Alternatively just set a breakpoint that stops the simulation every N time units of simulated time and use the Tcl "clock" command to print the current time, would that help?

stop -create -time -relative 10ns -continue -execute { set now [time ns]; clock format [clock seconds] -format "TICK: $now == %T"; }

Thanks for your reply.
I tried the command above the following way:

1 - entered the "stop" command

2 - entered "after 5000"

I was expecting to have interruptions during the execution of the command "after 5000", but that doesn't happen.

Pedro

The "stop" command doesn't accept a "after" argument so I don't understand what you did here (nor what you mean by "after 5000").

The time-related brakpoint options are: 

-time time_spec  [-absolute]  [-relative]  [-start time_spec ]  [-modulo time_spec]

please check the docs that I linked to in my first reply, everything you need is in there.

The "time" that the stop command will generate is the CPU time. I would like to stop every 10 seconds (human time).

As I mentioned before, there is no built-in way to stop based on real time, only simulated time can be specified with the stop command. What are you actually trying to achieve? If you can explain that, maybe I can propose a way to do it based on what is supported int eh simulator...

I am trying to measure the time a simulation takes to run, but without taking into account the time the simulator is doing nothing.

So if I run a piece of code that takes 10 minutes and go for lunch for an hour and then run another piece of code that takes 10 minutes more, I would like the reported duration of the sim to be 20 minutes and not 1h:20m.

OK, thanks for clarifying your request. If you just need this time measurement as a summary for the entire simulation, why not just add "-status -status3" to the xrun command line? This will result in a couple of lines at the end of the simulation log, including the actual CPU time spent:

xmsim: CPU Usage - 26.2s system + 31.0s user = 57.2s total (86.4s, 66.2% cpu) (myhost)
xrun: Time - 87.0s

Here you can see that the simulation used 87.0s of CPU time - this is not the wall-clock time but the time used actually doing work.

Thank you very much. I will try this.

Pedro