A Statistical Sampling Profiler

The Performance Analyzer feature in ModelSim is a statistical sampling profiler. It periodically "wakes up" and samples the current simulation at a user-determined rate, and records what is executing in the simulation during the sample period. The advantage of statistical analysis is that an entire simulation may not have to be run to get good information from the Performance Analyzer. A few thousand samples, for example, can be accumulated before pausing the simulation to see where simulation time is being spent.

The Performance Analyzer reports only on the samples that it can attribute to user code. For example, if you used the -nodebug argument to vsim, it could not report sample results.

During sampling, the Samples field in the footer of the Main window displays the number of profiling samples collected, and each sample becomes one data point in the simulation profile.

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