Mentor’s Nucleus RTOS Addresses Power Management and Connectivity
October 19, 2011. Mentor Graphics Corp. has announced its third-generation flagship Nucleus® real-time operating system (RTOS). The Nucleus product adds built-in power management capabilities that seamlessly use hardware features such as dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), making it suitable for power conscious, battery-powered applications. New Nucleus connectivity features include a certified “IPv6 Ready” networking stack and security protocols, as well as a variety of wireless communication options such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee to enable faster time-to-market when developing connected devices.
The Nucleus RTOS supports a comprehensive set of architectures and processor families, including ARM, MIPS, Power PC, and SuperH, as well as DSPs and soft processor cores on FPGAs.
“Mentor’s Nucleus RTOS targeting connectivity and low power demonstrates Mentor’s understanding of issues critical to today’s MCU-based designs,” said Miguel Morales, director of marketing for Stellaris Cortex-M MCUs at Texas Instruments. “The scalable technology, ease of configuration and small footprint makes the Nucleus RTOS an ideal solution for designers using Stellaris microcontrollers.”
“GCT is leading the 4G ecosystem with their single-chip LTE SoC solutions,” said Larry Dano, vice president of product development at GCT Semiconductor. “Having Nucleus as a solid software foundation and ecosystem enabler has been key for us. Our focus on reducing component cost, lowering power consumption, and offering a smaller footprint aligns well with the newly enhanced Nucleus.”
Used in more than 2.3 billion mobile handsets, the Mentor® Embedded Nucleus product delivers high performance while optimizing resource usage in a single-OS or multi-OS platform; it targets resource-constrained devices (frequency and memory).
Through single API calls, application developers can use the built-in power management capability in the Nucleus product to accomplish complex tasks like changing system states or switching operating points in a portable and re-usable way. This saves them from having to implement and maintain highly complex scenarios within their application code. The Nucleus RTOS also includes a new configuration technology that enables developers to immediately and easily customize system requirements.
“The growing number of our Nucleus customers is another proof point that Mentor continues to invest in best-in-class technologies and services,” said Glenn Perry, general manager at the Mentor Graphics Embedded Software Division. “We will continue this effort and work tightly with our hardware partners to help our mutual customers develop the most innovative products in the least amount of time.”
The third-generation Nucleus RTOS has been extended into the Mentor Embedded Nucleus ReadyStart™ platform, integrating software IP, developer tools, and services to provide a single ready-to-use solution for applications where fast boot time, deterministic performance, and small code size are essential. With the Nucleus ReadyStart platform, developers can create a board-specific application development environment in just ten minutes. It includes the Mentor Embedded Sourcery™ CodeBench technology, GNU-based integrated development environment (IDE), and the Mentor Embedded Inflexion® UI tool for dynamic 2D/3D user interface creation.
“One of the main value points that Mentor provides is engineering efficiency in products such as the high-performance Nucleus ReadyStart platform and dynamic Inflexion UI software,” said Michael Gabler, software team leader at Bosch GmbH. “Both have enabled us to develop our high-end cooktops the way we envisioned.”