News and New Products

Mentor's Embedded Crew Storms ESC

By Jessica Davis -- Electronic News, 4/5/2006

Mentor Graphic’s Accelerated Technology division unveiled several enhancements to its suite of tools in a series of announcements at the Embedded Systems Conference here this week.

The division, acquired by Mentor in 2002 to help the company better address the embedded design tool space, said that its Nucleus RTOS and its Eclipse-powered Edge tool suite are extending support to the MIPS32 34K processor core family.Both the processor and Mentor’s Nucleus are targeted at the consumer electronics market.

Mentor’s Edge has also been validated for Freescale i.MX processors, said Glen Johnson, manager of product marketing for the Accelerated Technology division.

“You would think that when designers pick a processor they do it because of the processor, but studies are showing that it has more to do with the tools that are available,” said Johnson. “That’s why Freescale is doing what they are doing.”

In addition, Mentor introduced Edge 1.2, the first major update to the tool. The upgrade moves Eclipse from a 3.0 version to a 3.1 version.The new version of Eclipse also improves performance issues.

The new version of Edge features dynamic variant support, which automatically sends updates to the debugger when the vendor adds a new instruction set to the processor. In addition, it adds new target support packages which simplify the connection configuration that is required to debug.Also new is Linux host support.

“Our ultimate goal is Linux target support, so Linux host support is a stepping stone to that,” said Johnson.

Mentor also announced the second release of Edge UML Suite under Eclipse, version 7.1. The new version greatly improves compilation, said Johnson, and also adds Clearcase integration for version control.