This document is a high-level guide to modeling devices in Simics, focusing on issues like performance, abstraction and levels of detail. It collects and summarizes experience from within Virtutech. The main purpose is to help beginners write device models that are accurate enough while still being efficient.
We define a device to be a piece of real hardware whose behavior we want to simulate in Simics, but which is not a processor. A device model is a Simics module which implements the behavior of the device; to model something is to implement it in software for simulation.
2.3 Transaction-Oriented vs. Bit-Level Device Models