Altera Corp. and electronic design automation (EDA) house Mentor Graphics Corp. have collaborated on software from Mentor to provide virtual platforms for Altera’s system on chip (SoC) field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).
The software from Mentor will support Altera’s entire SoC FPGA portfolio, including its third generation 14nm Stratix 10 SoCs equipped with a 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor. Altera said adding the accelerated embedded software to its line of products would decrease time to market and reduce the overall cost of design.
Mentor’s Vista SoC virtual platforms are pre-built, fully functional simulation models of the ARM processor subsystems that are in Altera’s 28-, 20- and 14nm SoC FPGA families, the company said. Altera also said although silicon availability is not yet here, customers can start embedded software development of the Stratix 10 FPGAs.
Joerg Bertholdt, director of embedded software marketing at Altera, said in a statement that virtual prototyping is a proven methodology for designers of SoC devices to “greatly reduce their development time while slashing development costs.” Using the software from Mentor, developers can “start their development earlier and maximize their design team productivity,” Bertholdt added.
The virtual platforms from Mentor for Altera’s FPGAs includes an instruction set simulator CPU model plus peripheral device models, a model of customer functions in the FPGA fabric and support for both bare-metal and Linux OS environments.
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