Mentor Announces 64-bit ARMv8-A support for the Nucleus Real-Time Operating System

April 20, 2017 -- Mentor, a Siemens business, today announced that its Nucleus® real-time operating system (RTOS) now supports the 64-bit ARMv8-A architecture, enabling device manufacturers to develop leading-edge products for high-growth markets including the automotive, industrial, medical, mil/aero and networking spaces. This new support also allows the Nucleus RTOS to leverage the benefits of 64-bit processing for a full range of 64-bit system-on-a-chip (SoCs). The Nucleus RTOS additionally enables the ARMv8-A AArch32 (32-bit) execution mode, allowing users to run legacy 32-bit code on 64-bit SoCs.

The initial Nucleus reference implementation for the ARM® architecture targets the NXP QorIQ® LS2085A-RDB Reference Design Board. Device support is available for kernels including NEON, Nucleus Process Model, CPU and UART, and can easily be extended by the customer or via Mentor Embedded professional services. This architecture port can also support related SoCs such as NXP’s QorIQ LS2080A/40A, LS2045A, LS2084/44A, LS2088A/48A, LS1012A, LS1046A/26A, LS1043A/23A, and LS1088A/48A processors.

The Mentor® Nucleus ReadyStart™ platform features the Nucleus RTOS support for ARMv8-A technology, and provides customers with a complete embedded development environment and source code, enabling embedded developers to quickly get products to market. The Mentor broadly-adopted Sourcery™ CodeBench integrated development environment (IDE) features ARM® DSTREAM™ support for the QorIQ LS2085 device, and a prebuilt, hardened and supported GCC toolchain. The toolchain comes bundled with both AArch64 and AArch32 multilibs providing flexibility and choice to end users when working with ARMv8-A based processors. The Sourcery CodeBench IDE also includes the Sourcery™ Analyzer product, a powerful embedded design analysis solution combining a unique profiling and analysis engine with data visualization capabilities.

The Mentor Nucleus RTOS is a low-footprint, highly scalable, hard real-time solution that delivers a high-end embedded operating system option with uncompromised system simplicity. The Nucleus RTOS comes enabled with multicore capabilities such as SMP and the Mentor® Embedded Multicore Framework, which supports USB 3.0, PCI Express and the TI WiLink 8 stack. The technology also integrates a Power Management Framework, allowing developers to specify application requirements with high-level hardware agnostic APIs, programming the Nucleus RTOS to automatically discover power-aware components for simplified design processes, increased code reuse, and faster time to market.

Mentor additionally offers the Nucleus Process Model (NPM), a lightweight process model enabling task and library isolation. It provides memory protection to gain significant increases in product reliability due to faster isolation of software faults, and the ability for deployed systems to self-diagnose. Further, this enables dynamic loading and unloading of processes making it highly extensible at runtime.

The Nucleus ReadyStart product with support for NXP’s QorIQ LS2085 device is available today. For additional product information, visit the website: https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/nucleus/