Accelerated Technology's Nucleus Products Offer Complete Support for Altera's Nios II Processors

EMBEDDED SYSTEMS CONFERENCE, Boston, Mass., Sept. 12, 2005 - Accelerated Technology, a Mentor Graphics division (Nasdaq: MENT), today announced that its Eclipse-powered Nucleus® EDGE software development environment is now available for the Nios® II family of embedded processors from Altera Corporation. The Nucleus EDGE IDE and the Nucleus RTOS software give field programmable gate array (FPGA) users a comprehensive development environment in which to configure software to better manage and build multi-core applications such as wireless broadband and Wi-Fi, cellular infrastructure, wire line, industrial control, automotive and medical.

The Nucleus software support for the Nios II processor includes the ability to automatically configure the Nucleus Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) software using Altera's Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). As a result the Nucleus RTOS software can be adjusted to any hardware changes that the developer might make using Altera's SOPC Builder system-level development tool. This is especially valuable during the earlier design phases when hardware may change frequently.

Nios II processor developers can then take their automatically configured source code and create projects in the Nucleus EDGE environment to build and debug their products within a matter of minutes. Automatic configuration of the Nucleus RTOS software, combined with the Nucleus EDGE software support for Nios II, further reduces the overall development cycle and time to market with features such as multi-core, multi-process debug capabilities, kernel awareness, hardware breakpoints, powerful scripting language support and more. The close link between the hardware and software builds offers extended configurability options while a complete development environment provides consistency, efficiency and reliability across all Nios II FPGA-based designs.

"Ease of use and flexibility are the key reasons Nios II has been adopted by more than twenty thousand embedded designers worldwide," said Chris Balough, Altera's director of software and Nios® marketing. "The Nucleus EDGE environment clearly complements these core Nios II advantages."

The Nucleus EDGE software consists of a seamlessly integrated IDE, compiler, debugger and system profiler. FPGA developers can use this all-inclusive environment to create embedded system products from start to finish.

"The Nios II FPGA is becoming a widely used processor architecture for Nucleus users," said Robert Day, director of marketing, Accelerated Technology Division, Mentor Graphics. "The addition of the Nucleus RTOS auto-configurability together with our premium Nucleus EDGE development tools will help make Nios II-based embedded systems development much easier."

Pricing and Availability

Licenses for the complete Nucleus EDGE development suite begin at U.S. $3,000 per seat. For more information, please contact Accelerated Technology at 800-468-6853 or info@acceleratedtechnology.com.

About Mentor Graphics

Mentor Graphics Corporation (Nasdaq: MENT) is a world leader in electronic hardware and software design solutions, providing products, consulting services and award-winning support for the world's most successful electronics and semiconductor companies. Established in 1981, the company reported revenues over the last 12 months of over $700 million and employs approximately 3,900 people worldwide. Corporate headquarters are located at 8005 S.W. Boeckman Road, Wilsonville, Oregon 97070-7777; Silicon Valley headquarters are located at 1001 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, California 95131-2314. World Wide Web site: http://www.mentor.com/.  

Accelerated Technology, a division of Mentor Graphics Corporation, is located in Mobile, Alabama and has engineering sites, sales offices and distributors worldwide. As a leading provider of royalty-free, embedded real-time operating system (RTOS) software, Accelerated Technology helps developers accelerate product time-to-market in a wide range of embedded device applications. Its comprehensive Nucleus RTOS includes a high-level design UML suite, graphical prototyping tools, kernels, middleware and Eclipse-based development tools. For more information, please visit www.acceleratedtechnology.com or e-mail us at info@acceleratedtechnology.com.

Mentor Graphics, Accelerated Technology, and Nucleus are registered trademarks of Mentor Graphics Corporation. All other company or product names are the registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective owners.