Mentor Graphics accelerates SoC and embedded system delivery

USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. announced release of the Mentor Embedded Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition product, a native software environment for developing embedded systems pre- and post-silicon.

Now, ever-expanding teams of software developers can remain in their core development environment and develop, debug, and optimize their complete software stack on virtual prototypes and emulation platforms, before and after first silicon.

“Software development and hardware development are deeply intertwined, yet intensely unique disciplines. Asking a software designer to use a hardware design tool is like asking a plumber to install your sink with an electrician’s wire cutters,” said Glenn Perry, GM of Mentor Graphics Embedded Software Division. “It’s critical to respect the uniqueness of each discipline and we believe our Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition delivers a true native software environment that deeply leverages our hardware design tool technology.”

The Sourcery CodeBench technology is the leading development toolchain and integrated development environment (IDE) for embedded Linux development, which is now the de facto standard reference operating system (OS) on all SoCs. The Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition product embeds the most advanced pre-silicon technology available from the hardware design tool flow, deeply into the native software environment. This yields a significant time-to-market advantage for software development teams by eliminating the valuable time and effort spent learning unfamiliar traditional hardware design tools.

The Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition tool goes beyond enabling software development ahead of silicon to offer unprecedented visibility into hardware/software interactions, otherwise unavailable through the limited debug interfaces in actual hardware.