Altera announced virtual prototypes of its industry-leading SoC FPGA family through a partnership with Mentor Graphics

     Altera Corporation announced a partnership with Mentor Graphics to provide embedded software developers with the best-in-class Vista® virtual platform that supports Altera's full range of SoC FPgas. Includes a third-generation 14 nm Stratix 10 SoC with a 64-bit quad-core ARM®Cortex-A53 processor. These advanced SoC virtual platforms accelerate the development of embedded software throughout the product lifecycle, significantly reducing time to market while reducing costs.

     The Mentor Graphics Vista SoC Virtual Platform is a pre-developed, full-featured ARM processor subsystem simulation model with each of Altera's 28nm, 20nm, and 14nm SoC FPGA families. Before the first wafer is available, software developers can start embedded software development and debug integrated 64-bit ARMv8 processor subsystems through the Stratix 10 SoC virtual platform.

     In addition, the SoC Virtual Platform supports large development teams for application development and software regression testing in the Altera SoC FPGA modeling virtual environment without the need for expensive hardware, thus simplifying the development of embedded software.

     Joerg Bertholdt, Marketing Director of Embedded Software at Altera, commented: "Virtual prototyping is a proven and reliable approach to software development, providing our customers with a comprehensive SoC virtual platform that dramatically reduces their development time while reducing development costs. As a result, software developers using our industry-leading SoC solutions are able to start their development early and improve the performance of their design teams."

     These virtual platforms, which include the instruction set emulator CPU model and peripheral device model, are provided as separate binary executables that can be downloaded and installed and run on the host PC with a pre-developed Linux image. In addition, custom functional models in the FPGA architecture can be linked to system-level simulations of virtual platform images. The virtual platform supports both bare metal and Linux operating system environments, and supports software execution and debugging under the multi-core configuration of Altera SoC.

     On the SoC virtual platform of Mentor Graphics Vista technology, users can seamlessly port to Mentor Vista virtual prototyping solutions. The Vista Virtual Prototyping tool suite further expands the SoC virtual platform with deep hardware/software interaction to support non-embedded exploration and analysis.

     Guy Moshe, general manager of the Design and Development Business unit of Mentor Graphics' Embedded Systems Division, said, "Altera is an industry leader in SoC FPGas, providing solutions that are supported by a number of excellent software tools that simplify hardware and software design. "In partnership with Altera, we offer a complete SoC virtual platform that enables Altera SoC FPGA developers to balance performance, accuracy, and cost while dramatically accelerating their software development."