Mentor acquires RTOS vendor Accelerated Technology

Mentor acquires RTOS vendor Accelerated Technology
By Michael Santarini, EE Times
March 8, 2002 (2:40 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020307S0082

SAN MATEO, Calif. — Moving to bolster its RTOS and embedded tool chest, Mentor Graphics Corp. has acquired Accelerated Technology Inc. (Mobile, Ala.). The companies would neither confirm nor deny the acquisition, which is to be announced next week at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, EE Times has learned.

The move will strengthen Mentor's position in the embedded tool space. Mentor first moved into embedded tools in 1996 when it acquired Microtec Research Inc., but has struggled to make up ground on the market leader Wind River Systems Inc.

The acquisition will give Mentor the Nucleus family of real-time operating systems, and a tool line called Codelab that could overlap Mentor's VRTX embedded tools.

Accelerated Technology has been a direct competitor to Mentor's Microtec Research grou p, but Accelerated sells royalty-free RTOS software, while Microtec uses a royalty model for VRTX.

Accelerated's proprietary family of Nucleus RTOSes include variants for real-time, deterministic embedded control; another integrates the Itron OS for consumer devices; and another integrates the OSEK OS for automotive and industrial applications.

Though Nucleus is a proprietary licensable RTOS, the code for the RTOS kernel is open and modifiable by a customer. Experts said that would make it a good match for customers using systems-on-programmable chips and programmable platforms, because the modifiable RTOS kernel spares users from modifying the instruction set of the controller incorporated into a design.

— Additional reporting by Chris Edwards of EE Times U.K.