Mentor and Freescale partner on virtual platforms

Mentor Graphics  and Freescale Semiconductor  have entered into a partnership agreement with the intent to deliver high-speed simulation platforms for Freescale’s QorIQ® P-Series, AMP and QorIQ Qonverge™ product lines of multicore embedded processors. In support of this partnership, Mentor now offers a virtual prototyping environment which allows Freescale customers to achieve early, more efficient software integration and may accelerate their product delivery cycles.

Freescale’s QorIQ product lines include:

• The QorIQ P-Series, which spans from single core devices consuming as little as 1.1 watts of power to the eight core QorIQ P4080, which delivers 1.5 GHz per core performance within a tight power envelope.
• The new QorIQ Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) processor series, incorporating a new, multithreaded 64-bit Power Architecture® core, 28nm process technology, up to 24 virtual cores, acceleration engines and power management to deliver up to 4x the performance of Freescale’s QorIQ P4080 device.
• Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge series of base station-on-chip products, which share the same architecture to address multi-standard requirements spanning from small to large cells.

The Vista™ product from Mentor allows Freescale customers to execute a variety of virtual prototyping platforms and port, debug and optimize operating systems and application software. The base SoC models are provided and validated by Freescale and integrated and packaged in Vista libraries. These Vista Virtual Prototype packages include the SoC HW model, optionally integrated with Linux, and can be expanded by the customer with a variety of standard and custom IPs and Physical I/Os. The platforms can also be extended to include timing and power attributes which enable performance and power tradeoff analysis, under realistic use cases and software execution, to be performed.

Similar partnerships have been formed recently between TI and Synopsys and between Xilinx and Cadence. This is all part of the blurring between tool and IP which I have spoken about in the past.

Brian Bailey – keeping you covered

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