Wind River Simics Adds Support for Freescale QorIQ P5020, P5010 and P3041 in Advance of Silicon Availability

Wind River, a world leader in embedded and mobile software, today announced the Wind River Simics virtual platforms for the Freescale Semiconductor QorIQ P5020, P5010, and P3041 multi-core processors. Simics provides Freescale customers and ecosystem partners access to a P5020, P5010, and P3041 development platforms before silicon is available, allowing them to begin evaluation and development now. Freescale introduced the advanced 64-bit dual-core QorIQ P5020 and single-core P5010 and the 32-bit quad-core P3041 processors this week at Freescale Technology Forum Americas.

“Starting with our support of the QorIQ P4080 in 2008, we have provided Simics virtual platforms to help Freescale and their customers and partners develop QorIQ based products in advance of hardware availability,” said Michel Genard, vice president, product strategy and marketing for Simics at Wind River. “With the ability to use a Simics virtual platform early in the development process, teams are able to reduce engineering costs and get to market faster.”

Simics provides the Freescale ecosystem of customers and partners a scalable platform for multi-core software and systems development. Simics offers QorIQ P5020, P5010 and P3041 developers a powerful debug platform that eases the complexities of multi-core software development. Customers can also quickly run “what-if” scenarios on their systems design without the need for physical prototyping. Highly scalable, the basic Simics virtual platform for Freescale QorIQ devices can be modified to match the customer’s specific hardware and then incorporated into a full system.

“Simics virtual platforms are vital in helping the Freescale development community get a jump-start in creating products based on our new multi-core processors,” said Preet Virk, director of strategy for Freescale’s Networking Processor Division. “Having our customers and partners simultaneously develop solutions early in the process is a huge benefit to the entire ecosystem.”

The P5020 and P5010 processors incorporate Freescale Semiconductor’s new QorIQ 64-bit e5500 core based on Power Architecture® technology. The e5500 core is engineered for next-generation, high-end control and data plane applications in networking, enterprise storage, security appliance, data center and aerospace/defense markets. It is based on e500 core technology and can run either in 64-bit or 32-bit mode, thus allowing legacy software support while providing an easy transition to 64-bit processing.

The introduction of the Simics virtual platforms for the QorIQ P5020, P5010, and P3041 processor builds on Wind River’s expansive virtual platform library, which includes the Freescale QorIQ P2020 and P4080 processor as well as thousands of models of other devices.

Additionally, Wind River plans to expand its software portfolio to also support the QorIQ P5020, P5010, and P3041 platforms.

The Wind River Simics portfolio supports a variety of hardware architectures, operating systems and tool environments and provides comprehensive virtual systems development solutions, allowing engineers to develop, debug, test and run their entire software application stack on a virtual representation of their target hardware. In February 2010, VDC Research1 released a report from their 2009 Embedded Software Market Intelligence Service that estimated Simics to be the market-leading virtual prototyping/simulation platform, with greater than 30 percent of total market revenue.