Mentor Graphics Partners with Freescale to Deliver Vista-based Virtual Prototype Solution for Freescale Processors

WILSONVILLE, Ore., January 12, 2012 — Mentor Graphics Corp. (NASDAQ: MENT) today announced it has signed a preferred, long-term partnership agreement with Freescale Semiconductor to deliver state-of-the-art, high-speed simulation platforms for Freescale’s QorIQ® P-Series, AMP and QorIQ Qonverge™ product lines of multicore embedded processors. In support of this partnership, Mentor® now offers a powerful virtual prototyping environment and enabling technologies which allow Freescale customers to achieve early, more efficient software integration and accelerate their product delivery cycles.

Freescale’s broad offering of QorIQ products provides industry-leading performance, price and power ratios across an array of networking and other applications. Freescale’s QorIQ product lines include:

• The widely adopted QorIQ P-Series, which spans from single core devices consuming as little as 1.1 watts of power to the flagship, eight core QorIQ P4080, which delivers 1.5 GHz per core performance within a tight power envelope.
• The new QorIQ Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) processor series, incorporating a new, multithreaded 64-bit Power Architecture® core, 28nm process technology, up to 24 virtual cores, groundbreaking acceleration engines and sophisticated power management to deliver up to 4x the performance of Freescale’s QorIQ P4080 device.
• Freescale’s QorIQ Qonverge series of base station-on-chip products, which share the same architecture to address multi-standard requirements spanning from small to large cells.

The Vista™ product from Mentor allows Freescale customers to execute a variety of virtual prototyping platforms and efficiently port, debug and optimize operating systems and application software. The base SoC models are provided and validated by Freescale and integrated and packaged in Vista libraries. These Vista Virtual Prototype packages include the SoC HW model, optionally integrated with Linux, and can be expanded by the customer with a variety of standard and custom IPs and Physical I/Os. The platforms can also scale to include timing and power attributes to enable performance and power tradeoff analysis under realistic use cases and software execution.

“As market requirements grow ever more demanding, our customers increasingly face faster, tighter design cycles,” said Raja Tabet, vice president, Software & Systems Networking and Multimedia Group at Freescale. “The Vista Virtual Prototyping solution is important for early delivery of our technology to key customers. We see Mentor, with its virtual platform solution and embedded software technology, as a key contributor to our broad ecosystem of world class enablement solutions for our QorIQ families of processors.”

“This preferred partnership with Freescale is strategic to our company-wide ESL strategy,” said Guy Moshe, general manager, Design Creation Business Unit at Mentor Graphics. “QorIQ processors are built upon the most advanced architecture and technologies, and are ideal for leveraging and deploying a Virtual Prototyping methodology. We are working closely with many leading-edge system companies, and we believe our partnership with Freescale helps to efficiently drive and deploy our technologies to the benefit of our mutual customers.”

About Vista

The Mentor Vista Virtual Prototyping solution is a state-of-the-art platform for modeling and prototyping complex hardware/software multicore systems early in the design cycle. The Vista product offers a scalable modeling and simulation environment based on market standards. The Vista platforms offer fast multi-process simulation at close to real-time speeds with unique debug and analysis toolsets. Customers can port and test software execution on the virtual platform with a variety of control and access capabilities to hardware execution, performance and power, most of which not feasible when running physical boards. The Mentor Vista product allows software engineers to use a standard software development environment to debug and optimize software on target hardware more efficiently.

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 electronic, semiconductor and systems companies. Established in 1981, the company reported revenues over the last 12 months of about $915 million. Corporate headquarters are located at 8005 S.W. Boeckman Road, Wilsonville, Oregon 97070-7777. World Wide Web site: http://www.mentor.com/.