This. And Claude writes my firmware and does a pretty damn good job, and it can even test with a bench setup. So honestly, I don't think this simulator has much viability. It's a bitter message but I think the earlier they recognize this the better.
The other contributing cause is the actual lack of silicon in supply and we are seeing it especially for the automotive industry, which is only spiking demand for better simulations to unblock teams.
If you want to ship with agents at scale you need a good testing pipeline now more than ever. We don't replace the bench setup test, we look to enhance what you bring to it.
But that doesn't take away from the fact that, yes you could just let your LLM continuously loop on some hardware setup, rinse and repeat for weeks. If you have the hardware and the time to spare.
We even tried to work with chip vendors (won't name here but they are 2 out of the 10 biggest microcontroller designers), but in reality, them providing their own simulation is a little bit counterintuitive for them.
They make their money on selling chips, and their thought is that providing a simulator would make it so that people buy less chips. If they do provide a simulator, it would be hella expensive, like through the Synopsys Virtualizer, which costs $500k per seat.
For RISC-V and open-source MCUs, they are easy to simulate. Just run the RTL through something like Verilator, and you have a fully working simulation.
We do hope that chip companies eventually do exactly that. We are also firmware engineers, and our goal is to make the simulation software we needed while working in the field. Either we make it, or they make it. Win-win in my opinion.