Mentor Graphics announces common embedded software development platform for any stage of development from virtual prototypes to hardware emulation

DAC 2011, SAN DIEGO, USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. announced a unified embedded software debugging platform, from pre-silicon to final product, based on the integration of the Mentor Embedded Sourcery CodeBench embedded software development tools with Mentor’s leading electronic system level (ESL), verification, and hardware emulation products.

These include the Mentor Graphics Vista Virtual Prototyping product, Veloce hardware emulator, prototype target boards, and end products or any combination thereof. The new common platform, being shown at the Mentor booth #1542 at DAC, enables embedded software developers to access technology data from hardware design tools without leaving their native embedded software environment.

“Mentor is closing the gap in the ESL methodology. Their embedded software group, strengthened by the acquisition of CodeSourcery, puts them in the technology leadership position in the ESL software design flow,” stated Gary Smith, chief analyst of Gary Smith EDA. “SoC and system developers will now have the flexibility to debug and analyze their systems at any stage and on any hardware representation.”

The Sourcery CodeBench product was derived from the December 2010 Mentor-acquired Sourcery G++ technology—the de facto standard for embedded Linux and bare metal software development, with over 20,000 registered users. The common platform provides the flexibility to run unified embedded software debug and analysis at any stage of development, making it an ideal solution for earlier visibility of system performance and embedded software validation. This enables upfront and continuous retooling of today’s complex SoCs and multicore designs, resulting in greater accuracy, optimized performance, and faster product delivery.

“The extension of Mentor’s Embedded Sourcery CodeBench unified software debugging platform to run on Mentor prototyping and emulation platforms presents a range of benefits for embedded software development,” stated Raja Tabet, vice president, Software and Enablement Technology, Networking and Multimedia of Freescale Semiconductor. “Using this technology, developers can speed time to market and address key software tasks earlier in the development cycle.”

Sourcery CodeBench: Industry’s most widely deployed GNU toolchain
The industry-leading Sourcery CodeBench integrated development environment (IDE) is based on the GNU toolchain and provides embedded developers with a powerful and easy-to-use tool suite to develop and optimize systems based on a broad range of devices. Sourcery CodeBench with SystemAnalyzer provides a system-level visual analysis capability that allows developers to see what is running on each software core to identify bottlenecks, gain insight on resource utilization, and to build more reliable multicore systems.

The host software target generated by the SystemAnalyzer tool includes a unique unified trace and debug data repository of code that can be tested across the evolving range of hardware representations. This technology provides consistency and flexibility throughout the entire system-level development flow by enabling hardware and software designers to select their preferred methodology for embedded software debug and design optimization, from virtual prototypes to boards.

“Since 1996, Mentor Graphics has been the only EDA vendor with a broad product line of embedded tools and software IP, now used in more than two billion devices worldwide,” said Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics Corporation. “Integrating our software and hardware expertise more readily enables our customers to deal with the challenges of today’s multicore and power management complexities.”

Mentor Graphics Common Debug Platform @ DAC 2011
The Mentor Embedded IDE used as the common debugging platform will showcase a Vista Cortex A9 Multi-core TLM platform and a Hybrid Platform that combines Vista Virtual Prototyping with accelerated RTL running on Veloce Testbench Express (TBX).

The Mentor Embedded Sourcery CodeBench product with Sourcery System Analyzer is available now at $2,799.