Developing high-performance real-time systems on the latest ARMv8-A system-on-chip architecture.
Targeting real-time applications in automotive, industrial, medical, military aviation, and networking systems.

Mentor Graphics Korea (CEO Young-in Yang) announced that Nucleus RTOS (an operating system for embedded systems developed by Mentor Graphics) supports the 64-bit ARMv8-A architecture.

This allows the Nucleus RTOS to take advantage of 64-bit processing across the full range of 64-bit SoCs. The Nucleus RTOS also supports the ARMv8-A aarch32 (32-bit) execution mode, which allows users to run legacy 32-bit code on 64-bit SoCs. This support for ARMv8-A SoC features enables device manufacturers to develop cutting-edge products for markets including automotive, industrial, medical, military/aerospace, and networking.

First, initial support for Nucleus is provided for the NXP QorIQ LS2085A-RDB Reference Design Board.

Device support is available for kernels including NEON, Nucleus Process Model, CPU, and UART. Device support can be easily extended by customers or 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.

“Mentor Graphics continues to demonstrate its leadership in embedded software and complements NXP’s advantages in providing high-performance ARMv8-A SoCs,” said Noy Kucuk, vice president of product management, Digital Networking business unit, NXP Semiconductors. “With 64-bit Nucleus RTOS support for NXP QorIQ communications processors, our joint customers can develop smarter, higher-performing devices with a proven, commercial real-time operating system solution.”

ARMv8-A support for the Nucleus RTOS is included in the Nucleus ReadyStart developer tool suite. This provides developers with the Eclipse-based Sourcery CodeBench IDE development environment and complete source code, enabling embedded developers to quickly bring their products to market.

The Sourcery CodeBench IDE is an embedded development platform that comes with ARM DSTREAM support for NXP's QorIQ LS2085 device and a prebuilt, hardened, and supported GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) toolchain. This toolchain is bundled with aarch64 and aarch32 multilibs, providing flexibility and choice for end users working with ARMv8-A-based processors. Sourcery Analyzer technology, included in the Sourcery Codebench tool, is a powerful embedded design analysis solution that combines a proprietary profiling and analysis engine with data visualization capabilities.

Nucleus products are feature-rich, hard real-time, low-footprint, highly scalable RTOSs with strict development time constraints, delivering advanced functionality without compromising the simplicity and compactness of the solution. At its core, the Nucleus RTOS implements multicore technologies such as SMP and the Mentor Embedded Multicore Framework, and supports USB 3.0, PCI Express, and the TI WiLink 8 stack. This gives it a unique position in the embedded market.

The Nucleus Process Model (NPM) is a lightweight process model that allows for the isolation of tasks and libraries. It also provides memory protection, significantly improving product reliability by allowing software defects to be isolated more quickly and enabling deployed systems to self-diagnose. Furthermore, it allows for dynamic loading and unloading of processes, thereby increasing runtime scalability.

Embedded developers can also take advantage of the built-in Nucleus Power Management Framework. Developers specify application requirements using hardware-independent APIs, and the Nucleus RTOS automatically identifies power-aware components, streamlining the design process, increasing code reuse, and accelerating time to market.