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STORE AND RESTORE

Incremental compilation means that the compiler inspects your code, determines which parts of the application are affected by your changes, and only recompiles the newer files. Incremental compilation can help reduce compile time on small applications, but you achieve the biggest gains on larger applications. The default value of the incremental compiler option is true for most tools.

While recompiling , Incremental compilation does less work than full recompile. The simulation doesn't show any difference , only the compilation time is reduced. Imagine you are working with hundreds of files and U just changed one file, During full recompilation , all the files are recompiled, where in incremental compilation , only the file which is changed and the files which are dependent on changed files are compiled and linked to the already compiled database.

Save and Restore saves the complete state of the simulator to a file that can be used to restart simulation at the point of the save.

If multiple simulation, have same property for several hours of simulation, then the simulation state can be shared across all the simulation. For example, In System Level verification, it takes more than a day for operating system to boot in RTL, then the testing scenarios starts. This boot operations in RTL can be saved to a state. Using this saved state, user can directly start simulation from the saved point. Typically, once a bug is discovered, perhaps hours or days into a simulation, the simulation would need to be repeated for hours or days to verify the bug fix. In Verilog, the simulation state can be saved at any time and restored, to skips hours or days into a simulation and validate a bug fix. This feature not only allows quick verification of bug fixes, but enables much longer simulations by not rerunning previously validated code.

Three system tasks $save, $restart, and $incsave work in conjunction with one another to save the complete state of simulation into a permanent file such that the simulation state can be reloaded at a later time and processing can continue where it left off.

EXAMPLE:

$save("file_name");
$restart("file_name");
$incsave("incremental_file_name");

All three system tasks take a file name as a parameter. The file name has to be supplied as a string enclosed in quotation marks.

The $save system task saves the complete state into the host operating system file specified as a parameter.

The $incsave system task saves only what has changed since the last invocation of $save. It is not possible to do an incremental save on any file other than the one produced by the last $save.

The $restart system task restores a previously saved state from a specified file.

Restarting from an incremental save is similar to restarting from a full save, except that the name of the incremental save file is specified in the restart command. The full save file that the incremental save file was based upon shall still be present, as it is required for a successful restart. If the full save file has been changed in any way since the incremental save was performed, errors will result.

Take care while using Pli application . Since PLI application may have some other form of simulation snapshot storage, the simulation tool doesn't have the control on them. $save system task, creates a checkpoint file and PLI tr routines are there to save the PLI snapshot.

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