Mentor Blogs

Hello all – Matt Radochonski from the Mentor Embedded marketing team with an update on our new board support packages for the last two months. You may have noticed from our monthly newsletters that we’ve released new BSP’s for Nucleus RTOS, Nucleus SmartFit and Nucleus ReadyStart for ARM and PPC architectures as well as TI, STMicroelectronics and Freescale MCU’s.  Below is a … Read More

BSP, supported processors, Board Support

I have read a lot in recent months about Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest incarnation of its flagship Windows operating system. While there are many new features over and above its Windows 7 predecessor, one thing that makes me quite curious about Windows 8 is its optimization for touchscreen technology. Note that I have yet to use Windows 8, but I have used several other touchscreen devices on the market … Read More

In the high-tech market, the IoT is driving connectivity requirements in devices across many segments. Considering the number of embedded medical devices hospital, you can quickly imagine areas where Wi-Fi connectivity can be used to connect devices, patients, administrators and doctors. For example, Wi-Fi can be applicable in the doctor’s office, in the operating room, at the nurse’s station, in the … Read More

Freescale, Medical, Wi-Fi, Nucleus, RTOS

  Chevrolet has just unveiled a new high-end pickup, the 2014 Silverado High Country. It has a chrome grille with horizontal bars, halogen projector headlamps, body-color front and rear bumpers, 20-inch chrome wheels, all-season tires, and chrome body side moldings, door handles and mirrors. Inside, Silverado High Country has a saddle brown interior and heated and cooled perforated premium … Read More

iPad, MiyLink, Chevrolet, park assist, Silverado High Country

Do you use PADS?  Did you know that the PADS ES Suite ships with the DxDesigner Schematic Editor providing a robust and powerful design environment tightly coupled to PADS layout with DxDatabook a powerful component information system and cross probing. With an innovative and reliable architecture, designed from the start to support hierarchy; a user needs only to create a circuit once before reusing … Read More

A unique concept most beginners have trouble grasping about the Verilog, and now the SystemVerilog, Hardware Description Language (HDL) is the difference between wire’s (networks) and reg‘s (variables). This concept is something that every experienced RTL designer should be familiar with, but there are now many verification engineers with no prior Verilog experience trying to pick up SystemVerilog … Read More

Verification, Functional Verification, Verilog

I don’t know about you but I read. A lot… It’s almost as if I’ve got an unquenchable thirst for information. It all started when I was 6 during a school break. I was bored and pestered my mom one too many times. In those pre-Nintendo days, she unceremoniously dumped me in my father’s study and told me to read a book.  I couldn’t reach most of the books on the shelves but my oldest sister had left her … Read More

fluid flow simulation, Engineering Edge

Taking a look at PADS is now easier than ever – we’re on the Cloud!  The full PADS ES Suite Evaluation is still available to download, but if you want a quick and easy way to evaluate PADS, check out the Virtual Labs. Here, you will have access to the full PADS ES Suite to evaluate, with lessons and exercises on simulation and analysis, design capture and CIS, and PCB layout and routing. No installation, … Read More

Unbelieveable! Don’t get me wrong, it is not the fact that pop-up ads appear all over commercial websites that annoys me; after all, we have had the same thing in magazines and newspapers for many years. Advertisements appear almost everywhere these days, the funding from which is an important part of many companies’ business plans. This is not the issue. The issue starts with the difference between … Read More

It has been interesting to be involved in the evolution of the GENIVI Linux Infotainment solution, and the progress of early adopters taking their implementations to market. At the GENIVI All-Members meeting in Barcelona last week, BMW presented some details of their 3-year journey to take a GENIVI 1.0 Compliant Linux-based platform into production, scheduled for later this year. The early … Read More

GENIVI INFOTAINMENT LINUX OPEN SOURCE

Pre-Silicon Software Development with Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition I recently got a crash course in hardware/software design workflows. While my software background is strong, my hardware design knowledge is very light. Any thoughts I have on Karnaugh maps or rising edge flip-flops are quite dusty. Even so, I clearly understood the problems solved by the new Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition, … Read More

virtual edition, Veloce, virtual prototype, pre-silicon, QEMU, Emulation, Vista, SystemC, RTL, Sourcery Analyzer

Aerospace engineers and enthusiasts, as well as science-fiction fans, are the latest Eagleworks experiment. The White-Juday warp field interferometer was designed and developed to record warped space and help scientists better understand the space-time bubble that would be required to break Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Albert Einstein theorized that a particle cannot travel faster than … Read More

Mentor Graphics, Mentor, Mentor.com, Albert Einstein, Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster, QVPT, Alcubierre drive, Aerospace, Mil-Aero, Geek, Milaero, Harold "Sonny" White, nasa, Eagleworks, plasma, Engineer

Back from my travels, so a brief post painting with my impressions of last week’s event … Design West [which I guess should now be called something different, as Design East has gone - preferably go back to it being Embedded Systems Conference] consisted of the conference itself and the trade show alongside. The show part seems to have been getting smaller each year. Although I have not … Read More

DESIGN West

The concept of machine-to-machine communication (M2M) is the foundation of the Internet of Things (IoT). Of the few core technologies that help facilitate this, zero configuration networking (zeroconf) is key. Zero configuration networking is what allows your personal, portable wireless devices to talk to other similar devices – without any additional setup required from the user. In the pre-zeroconf … Read More

M2M, mDNS, smart energy, zeroconf, Networking, RTOS

Power Aware Verification Course Modules Released I guess I could continue the puns on the low-power theme as a few readers may get a charge out of it.  And there is a reason I seem to gravitate to puns from the start.  The first chair of the IEEE 1801 committee and I exchanged puns one time that resulted in him shipping me a Pun DVD that recorded a pun contest in which one person and another tried … Read More

Low Power, Power Aware Verification, IEEE 1801, UPF