Mentor Graphics has announced the availability of Mentor Embedded Virtual Prototype Kits (VPKs) in the Mentor Graphics Vista and Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition products. This enables embedded developers to integrate, execute, validate and optimise software on various platforms. This solution is ideal for automotive in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), electronic control unit (ECU) networks, medical and industrial, networking, and military and aerospace product development.
Software debug and analysis, particularly for multicore heterogeneous systems, requires understanding complex hardware and software interactions, which is challenging with physical boards executions given the limited trace and control. Virtual prototyping allows developers to run software on a large number of configurable virtual prototypes to explore various configuration alternatives and software execution threads. This is done without the need for probes and complex board setup. Compared to executing software on physical boards, virtual prototyping with the Vista product introduces new timing and profiling technologies, with deeper, non-intrusive visibility and control of the entire system, including timing-dependent behavior. The result: deterministic execution and unlimited non-intrusive system-level profiling for efficient hardware and software analysis. In addition, integrated debugging with combined software and hardware view provides more complete system information to developers.
“Virtual prototyping is an important methodology for validating our software ahead of hardware availability and for tuning it for best performance. It accelerates the development cycle across our software and hardware teams and allows for higher productivity and greater quality code once the hardware ships,” said Amanda McGregor, Global i.MX 6 series product manager for Freescale. “The deep ‘white-box’ visibility and control is an important mechanism to uncover complex hardware/software interaction, inject faults, analyse data transfers, and identify bandwidth and resource utilisation issues that would have been hard or too late to find on the physical hardware.”
Virtual prototyping is ideal for software developers who need to integrate systems and functionalities into a single device, optimise software performance, and conduct software validation and regression testing. Virtual prototypes can also integrate seamlessly with RTL verification flows (e.g. UVM) and emulation to maximise simulation speed and debug efficiency.
The Vista and Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition products now support off-the-shelf, configurable virtual prototypes for the following device families: Altera Arria-V, ARM Versatile Express for Cortex A-9, Freescale Semiconductor’s i.MX 6, and Xilinx Zynq.
Unmatched Integration and Software Analysis The Vista and Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition are integrated with Mentor Graphics runtime platforms (Mentor Embedded Linux, AUTOSAR, Nucleus RTOS). Other embedded software vendors lack the models and platforms required for virtual prototyping efficiency. The integrated development environment (IDE) in the Vista and CodeBench Virtual Edition products include hardware and software views for systems performance, visibility and analysis.
Additional features for the Vista and CodeBench Virtual Edition products include:
• Graphical debugging and performance analysis tools that enable a system-wide, synchronised perspective across operating systems and application software functions.
• Non-intrusive HW/SW tracing supporting bare-metal and Linux applications on multicore/multisystem configurations.
• Combined HW/SW analysis perspective to easily locate correlation of critical evens in both regions.
• Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) cluster debugging with full register views.
• Ease of integration and simulation control of virtual prototypes within the CodeBench Virtual Edition environment.
“Our Vista and CodeBench Virtual Edition products are unmatched in the industry, and can execute software on a full range of platforms for system-wide performance visibility at the early stages of product development,” stated Guy Moshe, general manager of the Design Creation Business Unit within Mentor Graphics Embedded Systems Division. “Combining these products with Mentor Embedded virtual prototype kits for industry-leading hardware platforms can result in overall design performance improvements and accelerated product delivery schedules.”
