Imperas, OVP Initiative announce full support for MIPS MIPS32 1074K coherent processing system

THAME, ENGLAND: Imperas has released models of the new MIPS32 1074K Coherent Processing System (CPS) from MIPS Technologies Inc., including example virtual platforms incorporating both the MIPS32 1074Kc and 1074Kf cores and support for the cores in Imperas’ advanced software development tools.

MIPS Technologies has verified the functionality of these models under the MIPS-Verified program.

The processor core models and example platforms are available from the Open Virtual Platforms website, www.OVPworld.org/MIPS. The models of the MIPS processor cores, as well as models of the other MIPS processors, work with the Imperas and OVP simulators, and have shown exceptionally fast performance of hundreds of millions of instructions per second.

Art Swift, VP of marketing and business development, MIPS Technologies, said: “An early start to software development is critical for customer success on the advanced SoCs that will be based around our new 1074K CPS, which offers industry-leading speed for fully-synthesizable multicore IP. Having MIPS-Verified support from Imperas and OVP, the leading independent supplier of fast processor core models, enables our customers to get started immediately with their designs based on the 1074K CPS.”

All OVP processor models are instruction accurate, and very fast, focused on enabling embedded software developers, especially those building hardware-dependent software such as firmware and bare metal applications, to have a development environment available early to accelerate the software development cycle.

Virtual platforms utilizing these OVP processor models can be created with the OVP peripheral and platform models, or the processor models can be integrated into SystemC/TLM-2.0 based virtual platforms using the native TLM-2.0 interface available with all OVP processor models.

The OVP simulator also has integration into an Eclipse IDE, enabling easy use for software developers. In addition to working with the OVP simulator, these models work with the Imperas advanced tools for multicore software verification, analysis and debug, including key tools for software development on virtual platforms such as OS and CPU-aware tracing, profiling and code analysis.

“State of the art multicore processors such as the 1074K CPS require state of the art software development tools,” said Simon Davidmann, president and CEO, Imperas and founding director of the OVP initiative. “OVP, with ultrafast simulation, accelerates the development cycle and makes debug easier for software engineers.”

OVP offers MIPS developers access to the 1074K CPS models, as well as access to models of other MIPS processors, including the MIPS32 4K, 24K, 34K, 74K, 1004K and M14K families of cores. OVP also has reference virtual platforms incorporating the MIPS cores, including bare metal platforms and a virtual platform of the MIPS Malta development board.

This Malta virtual platform enables users to boot Linux in under 5 seconds on a 2GHz laptop using OVPsim, and to boot multicore SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processor) Linux in less than 8 seconds. These reference platforms are all available as source code, and are easily modified to add or change the memory and peripheral components to customize the platform as required for software development.