Mentor brings Accelerated Technology inside

Richard Goering

April 6, 2006

Richard Goering

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Tool and real-time operating system (RTOS) provider Accelerated Technology came to the Embedded Systems Conference for the last time this week. The people and products aren't going anywhere, but the entity that was Accelerated Technology will be known as the embedded systems division of Mentor Graphics Corp.

It took a while to get to that point, given that Mentor purchased the previously independent Accelerated Technology four years ago. "After four years, people have gotten used to the fact that Accelerated Technology is part of Mentor," said Glen Johnson, manager of product marketing for Mentor's embedded systems division.

Along with giving up the old name, Johnson said, there's increasing cooperation between the embedded systems sales force and the conventional Mentor EDA sales force. Moreover, he said, the Mentor name "allows us to build on the fact that we're a $700 million company."

At the Embedded Systems Conference, Mentor's embedded systems division announced RTOS and tool support for the MIPS32 34K multi-threaded processor, an enhanced Unified Modeling Language (UML) tool suite, and third-party validation for the Freescale i.MX processor family.

The latest version of the Edge UML tool suite, which allows 100 percent of a product's source code to be generated from UML, adds a model compiler that permits C++ code generation. It also provides configuration management and version control of UML models through an integration with Clearcase. The new release also claims to double the translation speed of UML models into documented C or C++ code.

Mentor Graphics' Nucleus RTOS and Eclipse-based Edge tool suite now support the MIPS32 34K family. In the 34K device, one instance of the Nucleus Plus RTOS runs in each of two virtual processing elements (VPEs). The Nucleus Plus on the first VPE initializes the second and controls all peripheral resources.

Finally, Mentor announced that Synchromesh Computing has validated the Edge tool suite on Freescale i.MX processors. Mentor claims the validation assures customers that the Edge software effectively supports the Freescale technology.