Mentor participates in Freescale software ecosystem

Concurrent with the Embedded Systems Conference the week of April 26 in San Jose, Freescale announced it has signed strategic alliance agreements with Enea, Green Hills Software, and Mentor Graphics. The goal is to establish an open, stable software ecosystem for Freescale’s QorIQ, PowerQUICC, and StarCore processors.

Freescale said it and its partners intend to share IP, invest jointly in product and technology roadmaps, and collaborate on go-to-market activities.In an interview at ESC, Glenn Perry, general manager of Mentor’s embedded systems division, commented on Mentor’s role in the alliance with Freescale, under which Mentor will provide commercial Linux-based software products supporting the QorIQ and PowerQUICC processors for telecommunications, military/aerospace, industrial, imaging, and printing applications. Traditionally, he said, chip makers and software firms have maintained an arm’s-length relationship, under which the chip makers provided evaluation software, requiring a re-start when their customers began commercial product development. Under the new agreement, Perry said, Freescale and Mentor have decided on a dividing line, with each organization focusing on its area of expertise. For customers, that will reduce time-to-market, Perry said, because customers will benefit from a seamless transition from evaluation and prototyping software environment to a commercial environment.

Freescale said its alliance with Enea focuses versions of OSE, OSEck, Optima Tools, and related software optimized for PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors as well as StarCore DSPs. The alliance with Green Hills Software focuses on providing PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors with optimized versions of Integrity, Integrity Secure Virtualization, MULTI Debugger, optimizing C/C++ compilers, TimeMachine debugging suite, and Green Hills probes.