Green Hills and Cadence Solutions

Cadence and Green Hills Software are partnering to leverage their respective strengths and accelerate embedded system safety and security.

Partnership Benefits

• Begin software development earlier
• Find hardware/software bugs earlier
• Integration of hardware and software debug tools
• Truly understand the operation of your complex, production-ready system
• Reduce time to market
• Reduce project risk

Green Hills Software

Green Hills Software is a worldwide leader in safety and security for embedded systems for diverse markets such as automotive, military aerospace, medical, industrial, safety, and security applications. Green Hills Software is serious about safety and security. Across all industries, they work with all of the certifying bodies around the world to achieve the highest levels of safety and security with all their products.

Partnership

Cadence and Green Hills Software are working together to integrate the Cadence^® Verification Suite with the Green Hills software development suite, as well as to optimize the Green Hills Integrity^® RTOS/Hypervisor for its execution on the engines of the Verification Suite. This partnership allows engineers to view complex communication interactions between all components of the embedded system. There are great productivity benefits to this.

Figure 1 illustrates Cadence and Green Hills tool integration as demonstrated today. With Cadence Virtual System Platform (VSP) in conjunction with Xcelium^™ simulation and the Green Hills MULTI Integrated Development Environment running on a laptop, you can bring up a Buildroot Linux kernel and do the following:

• Stop mode debugging of the Linux kernel itself as well as device drivers
• Debug at the application source level at the same time as you are debugging at the kernel source level
• Use hardware probes to grab trace data and overlay it on top of software debug data to view the software application, software kernel, and hardware trade data all in one window
• Use the TimeMachine debugging suite, which allows you to save the state of the entire system at any point in time, so when you encounter a bug, you can debug backwards in time, find the point where that issue happens, and then debug from there

Improving Productivity and Time to Market

Hardware verification tools allow SoC developers to bring the bug rate down faster, allowing SoC users to get their hands on simulated/emulated hardware earlier to begin their software development on Linux. This brings board bring-up sooner, which is a great benefit to both parties. Typically after board bring-up, it is a serial process for the production-grade software environment, including development of RTOS, safety/security software, application software, integration and performance tuning, test, and certification.

By leveraging our partnership and integration between Cadence and Green Hills products, users can bring RTOS enablement in much earlier in the SoC development process to run production-grade software on a verification platform, resulting in significantly reduced development time, improved product quality, and improved time to market.

Future Work*

The integration between MULTI and VSP will extend to other tools within the Cadence Verification Suite, such as the Palladium^® emulation and Protium^™ prototyping systems. We plan to integrate across the entire hardware verification suite so that we can be debugging hardware and software at any point in the design cycle.

*This page contains forward-looking statements regarding Cadence's business or products. Actual results may differ materially from the information presented here.