Embedded Virtual Prototype Kits Offer Unified HW-SW Debug and Analysis

New Mentor Graphics virtual platforms deliver unique non-intrusive trace for embedded systems optimization

WILSONVILLE, Ore., Jan. 20, 2015 – 

Mentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ: MENT) today announced the availability of Mentor® Embedded Virtual Prototype Kits (VPKs) in the Mentor Graphics® Vista™ and Sourcery™ CodeBench Virtual Edition products. This enables embedded developers to integrate, execute, validate and optimize software on various platforms. This solution is ideal for automotive in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), electronic control unit (ECU) networks, medical and industrial, networking, and military and aerospace product development.

Software debug and analysis, particularly for multicore heterogeneous systems, requires understanding complex hardware and software interactions, which is challenging with physical boards executions given the limited trace and control. Virtual prototyping allows developers to run software on a large number of configurable virtual prototypes to explore various configuration alternatives and software execution threads. This is done without the need for probes and complex board setup. Compared to executing software on physical boards, virtual prototyping with the Vista product introduces unique timing and profiling technologies, with deeper, non-intrusive visibility and control of the entire system, including timing-dependent behavior. The result: deterministic execution and unlimited non-intrusive system-level profiling for efficient hardware and software analysis. In addition, integrated debugging with combined software and hardware view provides more complete system information to developers.

"Virtual prototyping is an important methodology for validating our software ahead of hardware availability and for tuning it for best performance. It accelerates the development cycle across our software and hardware teams and allows for higher productivity and greater quality code once the hardware ships," said Amanda McGregor, Global i.MX 6 series Product Manager for Freescale. "The deep 'white-box' visibility and control is an important mechanism to uncover complex hardware/software interaction, inject faults, analyze data transfers, and identify bandwidth and resource utilization issues that would have been hard or too late to find on the physical hardware."

Virtual prototyping is ideal for software developers who need to integrate systems and functionalities into a single device, optimize software performance, and conduct software validation and regression testing. Virtual prototypes can also integrate seamlessly with RTL verification flows (e.g. UVM) and emulation to maximize simulation speed and debug efficiency.

The Vista and Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition products now support off-the-shelf, configurable virtual prototypes for the following device families: Altera Arria-V, Arm® Versatile Express for Cortex® A-9, Freescale® Semiconductor's i.MX 6, and Xilinx Zynq.

Unmatched Integration and Software Analysis

The Vista and Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition are integrated with Mentor Graphics runtime platforms (Mentor Embedded Linux®, AUTOSAR, Nucleus® RTOS). Other embedded software vendors lack the models and platforms required for virtual prototyping efficiency. The integrated development environment (IDE) in the Vista and CodeBench Virtual Edition products include hardware and software views for systems performance, visibility and analysis.

Additional features for the Vista and CodeBench Virtual Edition products include:

• Graphical debugging and performance analysis tools that enable a system-wide, synchronized perspective across operating systems and application software functions.
• Non-intrusive HW/SW tracing supporting bare-metal and Linux applications on multicore/multisystem configurations.
• Combined HW/SW analysis perspective to easily locate correlation of critical evens in both regions.
• Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) cluster debugging with full register views.
• Ease of integration and simulation control of virtual prototypes within the CodeBench Virtual Edition environment.

"Our Vista and CodeBench Virtual Edition products are unmatched in the industry, and can execute software on a full range of platforms for system-wide performance visibility at the early stages of product development," stated Guy Moshe, general manager of the Design Creation Business Unit within Mentor Graphics Embedded Systems Division. "Combining these products with Mentor Embedded virtual prototype kits for industry-leading hardware platforms can result in overall design performance improvements and accelerated product delivery schedules."

Product Availability and Information

The Mentor Embedded Vista virtual prototype kits integrated into the Vista and CodeBench Virtual Edition products are available now and can be downloaded from Mentor SupportNet (https://supportnet.mentor.com) in the Vista or the CodeBench Virtual Edition Product Downloads sections. For additional product information on the Vista product go to: http://www.mentor.com/esl/vista/virtual-prototyping/, and for additional information on the CodeBench Virtual Edition product go to: http://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/sourcery-tools/sourcery-codebench/virtual-edition.

About Mentor Embedded

The Mentor Graphics Embedded Systems Division enables embedded development for a variety of applications including automotive, industrial, smart energy, medical devices, and consumer electronics. Embedded developers can create systems with the latest processors and micro-controllers with commercially supported and customizable Linux®-based solutions including the industry-leading Sourcery CodeBench and Mentor Embedded Linux products. For real-time control systems, developers can take advantage of the small-foot-print and low-power-capable Nucleus® RTOS. For more information, visit www.mentor.com/embedded-software/.

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