Community Functional Verification Xcelium -> usage of xrun command

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Xcelium -> usage of xrun command

amnldm

Hello,

For running a simulation, I'm using the following command:

%>  xrun top_tb.sv -f files_list -gui -access rwc &

where the top_tb.sv is the TestBench and files_list is a list of RTL files, which should be simulated.

After running the 'xrun' command, the waves.shm and xcelium.d directories have been created.

As for my understanding, the xcelium.d is a working directory (what should it include?) and the waves.shm directory where the TRN and DSN files are stored.

1) the TRN files have been split during the simulation, each TRN file is about 0.5MB (500KB). Is there a way to manage the size of the generated TRN files?

2) is there a way to give a custom name to the simulation database? how?

3) could the xrun command be ran without the '-gui' switch? How then to see the waves?

Thank you!

  • How to open the last created database using the xrun command?

  • xcelium.d is the compiled simulation database, you don't need to care what goes into it, the contents are managed entirely by xrun.

    I already gave you probe commands and a link to the docs in another topic thread, please use that to learn about how to name the database files and manage their sizes (hint: there is a Tcl "database" command).

    You can of course use xrun without the -gui switch, and later use the "simvision" command to view the waveforms. You might want to add the "-lwdgen" switch when compiling the design, to generate some extra structural debug info for post-process debug (helps with driver tracing etc).

  • in reply to StephenH

    with the -gui script, a database named 'simulator' is open when the Xcelium GUI has been launched. But, the waves have been stored under the wave.shm directory, which is also a database and includes the TRN files.

    When I load/open the wave.shm database and close the 'simulator' database, I can see recorded signals, but cannot re-run the simulation from GUI (at least I cannot find a way how to do so). Should it work this way? What's the difference between the 'simulator' and 'waves.shm' databases? What purpose of each one of them?

    Where is the 'simulator' database stored? How/where can I save the waves, which were generated while running simulation from GUI?

    Is it possible to invoke the Xcelium GUI without running any simulation in advance, then from the GUI open a database and then run the simulation on this database from GUI? I mean let's say I have a compiled and simulated design. How can I open it from GUI and then re-run it from GUI?

    Another question ... When I run the simulation from GUI, what command/switch should be used so the waves be recorded for all the signals in the design and not only for just those which are shown/present in the Wave window?

    Here is one more thing... When I tried to open the waves.shm database after I have run a simulation on the 'simulator' database in the GUI, I've received this pop up window:

    So, when I simulate the database named 'simulator', the database named waves.shm is also get updated? But when I check the timestamp of the TRN files in the waves.shm, they have no got any new timestamp... I'm too mislead...

    So, what is the relationship of the 'simulator' and waves.shm databases and how should each one be used?

    How could the generated TRN files be stored? restored?

  • in reply to amnldm

    When you run interactive GUI, SimVision is getting the data directly from the "simulator". As Stephen noted earlier, you can also use SimVision in post-processing mode where you open a database. Since you opened a database, you are in post-processing mode and no longer connected to the simulator. If the simulation is still running, you can Open Connection instead of Open Database to reconnect.

    Unless you launched SimVision (what you referred to as Xcelium GUI) from xrun, it is merely an analysis tool. However, if it was launched with xrun -gui, then it can relaunch the simulation from Simulation -> Rerun Simulation.

    The probe example Stephen provided earlier show how to "probe -all ...".

    Tim

  • in reply to tpylant

    what does the shm stand for? does it state for the Shared Memory?

  • in reply to amnldm

    I answered this for you yesterday at the end of the thread https://community.cadence.com/cadence_technology_forums/f/functional-verification/57941/xrun-dump-all-internal-signals. If the answer was not complete, please provide more information on what you are not understanding.

    Tim

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