Technical Publications

Nucleus Platform Solutions

Posted in: Application Platform

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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Optimizing Cell/B.E. Performance with Mentor Graphics’ Nucleus OS

Posted in: Operating System
The Nucleus OS can significantly improve the performance, response times and memory system utilization in many complex systems, where other bulkier OS choices add significant overhead and do not provide real-time response.  This paper discusses how the smaller footprint of Nucleus and its real-time capabilities can address improved resource utilization to optimize PPE and SPE interaction.
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Storing Files Safely on Portable Devices

Posted in: Operating System
The requirements for file storage on portable devices are driven by interoperability and reliability in a battery powered environment. Portable devices typically share data with external systems such as a desktop computer in a standardized format. Power loss or surge while accessing a storage device poses a significant risk of corrupting file system data. This paper will discuss the file system requirements of portable devices along with suggesting strategies for meeting the design requirements.
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User Interface Development for Embedded Systems

Posted in: Application Platform

Design Strategies and Methodologies: ARM processors are used in a diverse range of embedded systems applications. An aspect of many of these devices,which is interesting to study further, is the user interface.

The definition of a "user interface" (UI), in this context of this paper, is : the facilities and mechanisms whereby an embedded system interacts with a user.
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Nucleus OS - Accelerating Encryption on the PowerPC 8349E

Posted in: Operating System
The focus of this technical paper is on how the Nucleus OS Security Services can be used to exploit the encryption hardware available on the PPC8349E to achieve significant performance increases. This paper is part of the Nucleus OS Security Services reference platform that is also available on this website. The evaluation platform provides a complete system for utilizing and evaluating the performance of the MD4, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, DES, 3DES, CAST-128, Blowfish, and AES encryption algorithms using either pure software or hardware acceleration.
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Enabling DaVinci Technology with Mentor Software

Posted in: Operating System
This white paper discusses the features of Texas Instruments' DaVinci platform and how Mentor Graphics provides a complete solution to support this platform. This solution includes a discussion on the EDGE developer Suite, Nucleus OS, and Inflexion Platform UI. This paper further delves into how the DaVinci platform can be used in different multimedia based devices and provides an example to work through the details.
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Emerging Embedded Technology in the Automotive Industry

Posted in: Operating System

Exciting times these are! The automotive technology industry is seeing a whole new trend taking shape. Car technology is just in its infancy and already there are many interesting concepts being rolled out from major car manufacturers all over the world. There have been early successes and minor setbacks in this highly competitive industry. This paper will attempt to outline some of the advances that have been made recently, and based upon past trends, will predict the direction this industry is going. In the mind of the author, this direction holds enormous potential for new applications of embedded technology, can bring a wave of new trends and mega-trends in the automobile industry, accounts for many years of sustained fruitful business for car manufacturers and increases value and functionality. It also decreases costs with every coming year for the person who matters the most: the car buyer.

Tokyo, Detroit and Munich, the race is on!

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Three Embedded Software Techniques

Posted in: Operating System
Many types of embedded software are driven by performance. Increasing performance of the software can lead to savings by requiring less CPU horsepower to run the application, thus enabling more functionality to be added, or by allowing the application to be possible at all. In the following article, I will show three techniques that have been valuable in measuring and increasing embedded software performance learned through my firsthand embedded experience.
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How a Compiler Can Aid Embedded Software Developers

Posted in: Development Tools

When a software developer is acquiring a compiler, a primary consideration is the code quality produced by the compiler. But other features that are not required by the ANSI language description (that are tailored to embedded developer needs) can make the developer's task simpler to maintain. This paper investigates some desirable features of compilers used in embedded application development, and some techniques for making use of these features.

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