Mentor Graphics announces new IDE based on GNU toolchain

ESC Silicon Valley 2011, SAN JOSE, USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. announced the Mentor Embedded Sourcery CodeBench product, a next-generation integrated development environment (IDE) based on the open source GNU toolchain.

The Sourcery CodeBench technology provides embedded developers with a powerful and easy-to-use tool suite for developing and optimizing systems based on a broad range of devices from the most advanced microprocessors to microcontrollers.

“The Mentor Embedded Sourcery CodeBench GNU toolchain provides a valuable development ecosystem for our industry-leading multi-core, multi-threaded processors, including our XLP processor family,” said Chris O’Reilly, VP of marketing at NetLogic Microsystems. “Our customers benefit from time-to-market and cost savings by using Mentor’s open source tools to quickly optimize their devices for tomorrow’s innovative systems.”

The Sourcery CodeBench product incorporates technologies which Mentor acquired from Code Sourcery in November 2010. The Sourcery CodeBench tool introduces new support for the NetLogic Microsystems XLP multi-core processor, Freescale Kinetis, and Xilinx Zynq. The Sourcery CodeBench product is integrated with the Mentor Embedded Sourcery Probes and third-party probes.

The comprehensive Sourcery CodeBench tool suite comprises an IDE based on Eclipse, the Eclipse C/C++ development tools and compilers, and GNU toolchain, including an assembler, linker, runtime libraries, and source-level and assembly-level debuggers. Containing all of the tools needed to build and debug embedded applications, the Sourcery CodeBench product is integrated with the Sourcery Probe family and, in addition to the new architectures listed above, supports AMD64, ARM XScale, Freescale ColdFire, Power Architecture, Intel IA32 and EM64T, MIPS, SPARC and Texas Instruments Stellaris processors.

Visualization of system bottlenecks with Sourcery system analyzer
The Sourcery CodeBench IDE includes the new Mentor Embedded Sourcery System Analyzer technology, a specialized tool that helps embedded developers to quickly visualize and analyze system data. By allowing embedded developers to understand the performance characteristics of an application or a complete system, Sourcery System Analyzer can locate bottlenecks so the embedded developer can debug or decode these problem areas easily and improve design performance.

Execution data is collected from several sources including the Linux and Nucleus operating systems. The Linux Trace Toolkit (LTTng) provides a broad view of Linux behavior in operation to gain insight on how the resources and processors are being used. The Sourcery System Analyzer product is capable of working with large datasets, integrating and correlating multiple sets of information and creating compelling visualizations.

The Sourcery System Analyzer tool allows the user to manually apply trace point placements anywhere in the application to identify the start and end (and points in-between) of a critical section of code that the developer wants to explore. The user trace points can then be displayed and manipulated with the Sourcery System Analyzer product to identify and fix problems.

“Our new Sourcery CodeBench environment takes powerful technology from open source, extends it, and makes it easy for developers to use,” said Glenn Perry, general manager, Mentor Graphics Embedded Software Division. “This product tracks with our strategy to increase the availability of open source-based products and services for the larger embedded community in order for them to better compete in fast moving markets.”

The Mentor Embedded Sourcery CodeBench Personal Edition is available starting at $199. The Professional Version with System Analyzer is available starting at $2,799.