Embedded Systems

An operating system is the very essence of any embedded design. The way it performs, how it responds, and how it evolves are all critical characteristics of a best-in-class operating system. With our highly-regarded Nucleus OS™, EDGE Developer Suite™, and board specific Platform Solutions, Mentor Graphics has been at the forefront of embedded software for nearly 25 years.

Embedded Systems Design and Mentor Graphics On-Demand Web Seminar: Fundamentals of Embedded Software Platform Solutions - A presentation of key fundamentals that will help you find success in the embedded product development cycle. View now!

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Empowering Embedded Development for ARM, MIPS Technologies, PowerPC and Freescale ColdFire. View Demo Now.

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Embedded Systems Design and Mentor Graphics Editorial On-Demand Web Seminar: The embedded developers dilemma - How to deliver quality products on budget and on time. View now!

Why is Nucleus OS™ so popular? Nucleus OS has a small, highly scalable footprint and is fully optimized to effectively utilize today’s underlying hardware. These features make it ideally suited for minimizing power consumption and keeping costs down. Empowering you – and your electronic devices.

From the critical operation of a real-time kernel in a state-of-the-art pacemaker, to the multimedia performance found in smart phones and other handheld devices, much is expected from embedded software today. At Mentor, we work closely with our customers, offering a variety of Nucleus middleware components to match their specific needs.

Our approach is simple...

Design

Regardless of the hardware, the OS and middleware components must support it out of the box and scale effectively as needed. Only then will you be free to focus on what really matters: getting the product right.

Develop

Once you have the right OS and middleware components, time is valuable to work on the hidden, yet highly critical elements of coding, compiling, debugging, profiling, and simulation. You need the right development tools to develop quickly, under budget, and on time.

Differentiate

With the right development tools and workflow, your team can focus on delivering a great end-user experience without having to add significant cost or jeopardizing the original project.

Mentor understands your challenges and provides everything you need to “Design, Develop, and Differentiate” your electronic devices whether it’s Nucleus OS™, EDGE Developer Suite™, or our Platform Solutions.

Featured Embedded Systems Techpubs

Nucleus Platform Solutions

Electronic devices are evolving at a breakneck pace as manufacturers strive to differentiate from the crowd with more features, lower power consumption, and a better user experience. Such enhancements might be great for the end user, but they cause major headaches for the software developer who must deliver ever more sophisticated software on top of ever more complex silicon, and still get products out the door on time and within budget. What's needed is a new kind of development platform which empowers electronic devices: flexible enough to be reused across a wide range of products and scalable enough to exploit the unique capabilities of any target silicon. Introducing Nucleus Platform Solutions from Mentor Graphics ...

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Software Abstraction

This paper explores software abstraction concepts, discusses the costs associated with designing and implementing good levels of abstraction, and focuses on the usefulness of software abstraction within embedded systems.

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Advanced Testing Methods for Automotive Software

Recent history attests to the need for improved software testing methods in the automotive industry. Take, for example, Toyota?s October 2005 recall of 75,000 Prius hybrids in North America. A logic error in embedded software exacted a huge, if undisclosed, financial cost for the company and an inestimable cost in consumer confidence. And while we may never know the exact series of events that led to flawed code being shipped in the Prius, we do know the key to delivering bug-free software: test early and test often.

However, the distributed nature of automotive control systems, as well as the nature of the embedded software development process itself, makes testing a challenge. In the first place, simply gaining access to the necessary hardware environment for early and frequent testing may be expensive or impracticable. Moreover, effective validation and testing of distributed applications requires a sophisticated software infrastructure that is unlikely to be available off the shelf for the wide variety of microprocessors and peripheral hardware used in automotive systems and inordinately time-consuming and expensive to develop in-house. These factors speak to the need for testing environments that are abstracted from the underlying hardware architecture, capable of advanced regression testing and debugging of distributed applications, and aware of the operating system and protocol standards used in the automotive industry.

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