CALIFORNIA, USA: Mentor Graphics Corp today announced it has signed a preferred, long-term partnership agreement with Freescale Semiconductor to deliver state-of-the-art, 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 powerful virtual prototyping environment and enabling technologies which allow Freescale customers to achieve early, more efficient software integration and accelerate their product delivery cycles, said a press release.

Freescale’s broad offering of QorIQ products provides industry-leading performance, price and power ratios across an array of networking and other applications.

Freescale’s QorIQ product lines include:

• The widely adopted QorIQ P-Series, which spans from single core devices consuming as little as 1.1 watts of power to the flagship, 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, groundbreaking acceleration engines and sophisticated 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 efficiently 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 release added.
The platforms can also scale to include timing and power attributes to enable performance and power tradeoff analysis under realistic use cases and software execution.

“As market requirements grow ever more demanding, our customers increasingly face faster, tighter design cycles,” said Raja Tabet, vice president, Software & Systems Networking and Multimedia Group at Freescale.

He added that the Vista Virtual Prototyping solution is important for early delivery of their technology to key customers. They see Mentor, with its virtual platform solution and embedded software technology, as a key contributor to their broad ecosystem of world class enablement solutions for their QorIQ families of processors.