Virtutech was founded in 1998 as a spin-off from the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2004, the headquarters was moved to San Jose, California, USA. The Stockholm site remains the company's R&D center. The company's main product is Simics software, used by teams of software developers to simulatecomputer systems. This facilitates the development, testing, and debugging of embedded software that runs devices such as high-end servers, network hardware, aerospace/military vehicles, and automobiles. Virtutech markets products that allow embedded software developers to create virtual models of hardware using an ordinary desktop computer, run specified sets of tests, and walk the programs through each step of execution, both forwards and backwards. See the Simics Wikipedia article for more on the product. 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 is 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.
