Questa Prime Becomes Questa One Sim

 

 

Siemens EDA announced and is now launching Questa One Sim, a major upgrade to your existing Questa Prime environment, as part of the upcoming June release.
Questa One Sim isn’t a new side tool or optional add-on - it’s a direct replacement designed to do what Prime did, only faster, smarter, and more automated. If you're a Questa Prime user, you'll soon be running Questa One Sim.

 

Figure: Key capabilities of Questa One Sim (“Faster Engines, Faster Engineers, Fewer Workloads”) 

 

What Is Questa One?
Questa One is a comprehensive suite of verification solutions, designed to address the escalating complexity of modern ASICs and FPGAs designs. It aims to transform traditional verification processes by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to enhance accuracy, reduce time-to-market, and improve overall productivity:

• Questa One Sim – the next-generation simulation and debug engine (replacing Questa Prime).
• Questa One SFV – a stimulus-free formal/static verification solution leveraging several formal and static tools combined with AI and automation.
• Questa One Verification IQ – a cloud-native, data-driven platform for verification planning, traceability, and analytics.
• Avery Verification IPs – protocol-compliant VIPs for simulation, formal, and emulation flows.

Together, they offer a cohesive approach to verification that’s scalable, intelligent, and production ready.

 

What Is Questa One Sim?
Questa One Sim is Siemens' next-gen, high-performance simulation platform, purpose-built for modern ASIC, and FPGA designs. It combines simulation, debug, coverage, and acceleration technologies into one unified flow - offering better speed, scalability, and engineering efficiency out of the box.
Here’s how it delivers:

 

FASTER ENGINES

• New Engine: Completely modernized, backward compatible, and faster simulation core delivering better performance across mixed-language designs.
• ParallelSim with Auto-Partitioning: automatically divides the simulation workload across multiple CPU cores by intelligently partitioning the design, delivering significant performance gains for large and complex simulations.
• New Coverage Engine: High-performance, scalable coverage data collection and real-time analytics, accelerating coverage closure across simulation, formal, and emulation platforms.
• FuSu (Functional Safety): Integrated high-performance fault simulation and safety analysis to efficiently verify fault detection and diagnostic coverage, supporting ISO 26262 compliance for safety-critical designs.

FASTER ENGINEERS

• NextGen Profiler: A new multi-test profiler spans entire regression suites to identify performance bottlenecks across multiple tests. Helps optimize testbench code and regression load by highlighting slow sections over many runs.
• Intelligent Debug: leverages AI-driven analytics, failure signature detection, and root cause prediction to accelerate bug triage, isolate issues faster, and reduce overall debug time in complex verification environments.
• Metastability Analysis: Integrated Questa CDC function that dynamically inject CDC metastability into RTL functional simulation to verify the DUT is tolerant of random delays caused by metastability.
• Static & Dynamic Power Analysis: Questa Power-Aware simulation with UPF 4.0 support and enabling early detection of power-related issues by combining structural UPF consistency checks with dynamic, power-aware simulation to validate power intent across all operating scenarios.

FEWER WORKLOADS

• Coverage Acceleration (CX): Uses innovative technologies and patented machine learning techniques to help users start coverage early, ramp up faster, and close coverage more predictably and efficiently.
• DFT Acceleration (DX): Questa One Sim DX runs ATPG/MBIST patterns at high speed with Tessent integration.
• SmartCompile: Accelerates verification by incrementally recompiling and optimizing only the modified parts of a design, reusing existing compiled data to significantly reduce simulation setup time and enable faster debug cycles..
• Unreachable Analysis: Automatically identifies and proves unreachable code and unreachable FSMs states, and conditions, enabling precise coverage closure and helping verification teams distinguish between real coverage gaps and untestable logic.

What You Need to Know

• No action required: Questa One Sim will replace Prime Sim automatically in your flow starting with the June release.
• Fully backward-compatible: Scripts, testbenches, and regression environments carry over without modification.
• Same license. More power. The upgrade is included in your current Questa Prime entitlement.

Whether you're focused on closing coverage faster, debugging more efficiently, or accelerating DFT and safety signoff, Questa One Sim brings measurable gains with minimal disruption.

 

Call or email us if you want to know more.