In 2001,
AMD and Virtutech began working collaboratively on simulation for AMD's Hammer chips. In July 2005,
IBM selected Virtutech Simics for development of its
POWER6 platform. In 2007, Virtutech and
Freescale announced a collaboration program around multicore processors. Virtutech thus appears to have a customer base that is partly in the embedded software world, and partly in the general computing and server world. Virtutech was a member of
Power.org. As
embedded systems become more complex, especially with the advent of
multiprocessors, it has become increasingly difficult to develop and debug
embedded software without the use of specialized tools. Virtutech's idea is to provide tools that allow developers to develop software faster than they would using hardware and traditional development methods. In particular, by modeling a complex hardware system using software running on an ordinary workstation computer, Virtutech claims to reduce the challenge of embedded software development. On February 5, 2010,
Intel announced that it had acquired Virtutech and that Simics will now be maintained by Intel's subsidiary
Wind River Systems. The price of the acquisition was $45M. ==References==