Mentor Graphics partners with ARM

7th June 2016

Jordan Mulcare

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Mentor Graphics Corporation has announced a collaboration with ARM to provide accessible and affordable access to Mentor’s Tanner AMS analogue/mixed-signal design flow for ARM Cortex-M0 processor-based implementations as part of the ARM DesignStart programme. The collaboration lowers the barriers to embedded and IoT device design and verification through a combination of an affordable, complete IC design tool suite and the ability to evaluate the design flow on a reference design at no cost.

The ARM DesignStart program offers SoC designers access to free Cortex-M0 processor IP for design, simulation, and prototyping, with the option of then purchasing a simplified fast-track license for commercialisation.

“The free evaluation environment and an affordable tool suite from Tanner gives any vendor a fast and effective way to develop Cortex-M0 based smart analogue mixed-signal designs,” stated Nandan Nayampally, vice president of marketing and strategy, CPU Group, ARM. “Our partnership with Mentor Graphics will streamline the path to full production of IoT and embedded products, reducing developers’ costs and increasing their speed to market.”

The Tanner design flow supports digital, analogue, AMS, and MEMS design in one complete, highly integrated, end-to-end flow. Designers capture the schematic, perform analogue and mixed-signal simulation, and lay out and verify the physical design. This design flow offers a complete, processor-based IoT chip environment.

Designers will be able to evaluate an ARM Cortex-M0 IoT reference design at no cost by using a web-based Mentor Virtual Lab to interact with the complete set of Tanner design tools. After evaluation, customers can easily purchase the specially-priced software from Tanner to begin creating their own IoT designs and combine this with the free Cortex-M0 design access available on the ARM DesignStart portal.

“The Tanner design flow is already very popular with IoT design companies,” said Greg Lebsack, general manager of the Tanner EDA business unit at Mentor Graphics. “By collaborating with ARM on DesignStart, we further strengthen our design flow by making it easy for AMS designers to include an ARM Cortex-M0 processor in their IoT designs.”