New strategic alliances strengthen and expand software solutions for Freescale processors

AUSTIN, USA: Freescale Semiconductor has signed strategic alliance agreements with Enea, Green Hills Software and Mentor Graphics to establish comprehensive enablement solutions for Freescale’s QorIQ, PowerQUICC and StarCore processors.

Freescale and its strategic software partners intend to share IP, invest jointly in product and technology roadmaps, and collaborate on go-to-market activities.

Aimed at providing Freescale’s customers with an even broader range of software and enablement solutions for the QorIQ, PowerQUICC and StarCore platforms, the agreements encourage deep collaboration at the earliest stages of design and throughout the entire processor product lifecycle.

The partnerships are expected to produce a wide array of pre-integrated and highly optimized solutions that enable new levels of performance, ease-of-use and energy efficiency for Freescale’s processors.

Freescale expects to announce more strategic alliances with additional software partners in the future.

“Freescale firmly believes that an open, stable and thriving software ecosystem is essential to accelerating innovation and preserving customer choice in embedded markets,” said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale’s Networking and Multimedia Group.

“Embedded multicore processors have become extremely advanced, requiring highly optimized software platforms and tools to unlock their full performance and energy efficiency capabilities. We believe that deepening these strategic alliances, combined with our already well-established software relationships, delivers what our customers need to leverage the full value of our highly sophisticated multicore processors.”

In addition to strengthening its partnerships with Enea, Green Hills and Mentor, Freescale will continue to foster an independent ecosystem of third party partners to ensure customers have the broadest possible range of choices to meet their design needs.

Freescale’s strategic alliance with Enea focuses on enabling highly optimized versions of OSE, OSEck, Optima Tools and related software for PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors, as well as StarCore DSPs.

Freescale’s strategic alliance with Green Hills Software focuses on enabling PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors with highly optimized versions of INTEGRITY, INTEGRITY Secure Virtualization, MULTI Debugger, optimizing C/C++ compilers, TimeMachine debugging suite and Green Hills probes.

Freescale’s strategic alliance with Mentor Graphics focuses on enabling highly optimized Linux solutions for PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors. As part of the strategic alliance, Freescale and Mentor Graphics will align on a common Linux build and distribution methodology for PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors.

“Despite recent trends toward consolidation, we believe that thriving and open ecosystems remain the preferred approach for enabling processors designed for the extremely diverse embedded space,” said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. “Freescale’s new strategic alliances strengthen its comprehensive solutions while providing more software choices for its PowerQUICC, QorIQ and StarCore customers."

The capabilities of Freescale’s newest strategic partners complement the company’s deep portfolio of internal enablement technologies and its extensive software capabilities. Freescale began a series of strategic software technology acquisitions with the 1999 purchase of Metrowerks Corp. and its CodeWarrior tools and operating systems.

Since then, Freescale has incorporated additional talent, software, tools and Linux operating system technology from Lineo, AMC, Hiware, Intoto, Processor Expert and the MQX Runtime Platform. Technology from the recent Intoto acquisition powers Freescale’s VortiQa brand of multicore application software.

Freescale’s extensive internal software capabilities, together with the outstanding technology of its strategic partners and broad ecosystem, are designed to offer Freescale’s customers the widest set of highly-optimized software and enablement solutions.