PolyCore Software, Micrium and Altera Simplifying New Multicore Designs

Companies are increasingly using multicore technologies to build new products using new processes. The complexity of this technology uses software intensive applications, which give organizations better performance with superior flexibility while reducing costs and power consumption. Although the technology gives organizations  a clear strategic advantage, the entire architecture must be balanced between hardware and software to maximize the promise of multicore. PolyCore Software, developer of tools for improving productivity for multicore and multi-processor architectures, and Micrium, provider of embedded software components, have announced the support for Altera's Cyclone V SoCs, which integrates a dual-core ARM (News - Alert) Cortex-A9 processor into a low-power, low-cost 28nm field-programmable gate array (FPGA).

The collaboration between the three organizations will give customers a message-passing programing model and a reliable real time operating system (RTOS) that encourages a development environment with a simplified process for creating new multicore designs.

PolyCore Software's Poly-Platform and Micrium's uC/OS-II are integrated and ported to Cyclone V SoCs. This allows designers a scalable architecture that protects the software investment of the future.

Poly-Platform gives developers a set of tools for productivity and runtime communications engine, making the development of applications for multicore platforms much simpler. Poly-Platform improves development time and cost. By creating models from communications programming, development times are reduced from months to weeks, or even days. The time and cost saving is achieved during the first program and throughout every successive program.

Altera (News - Alert)'s Cyclone V SoCs provides high performance that is ideal for distinguishing high-volume applications such as handheld devices, industrial motor control drives, protocol bridging and video converter and capture cards. The SoCs from Altera are the lowest system cost and power available in different programmable logic densities with several system-level functions hardened in silicon.

Altera SoCs are designed to:

• Preserve the flexibility of processor boot / FPGA configuration sequence, system response to processor reset, and independent memory interfaces of a two-chip solution
• Maintain data integrity and reliability with integrated error correction code (ECC)
• Protect DRAM memory shared by the processor and FPGA with an integrated memory protection unit
• Enable system-level debug with Altera’s FPGA-adaptive debugging for unmatched visibility and control of the whole device

It also has the lowest  power serial transceivers with 88 mW maximum power consumption per channel at 5 Gbps, and more than 4,000 MIPS (Dhrystones 2.1 benchmark) processing performance for under 1.8 W (for SoC).

"Cyclone V SoCs are highly configurable, which is a good fit with Poly-Platform's highly configurable development environment. With Micrium's RTOS, our customers can quickly adapt their software to the hardware resources, resulting in a highly optimized end product," said Sven Brehmer, president and CEO of PolyCore Software.