In honor of the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) this week in San Jose, Freescale Semiconductor has embedded itself with a trio of software companies – Enea Systems, Green Hills Software and Mentor Graphics – to bolster its software package offerings.
Freescale hopes the move will give impetus to independent software vendors in the face of other software suppliers being bought up by larger hardware makers like Intel, Cavium, and RIM.
In the past 12 months alone device software optimization firm Wind River Systems has been acquired by chip giant Intel, whilst fellow semi Cavium Networks snapped up open source software developer, Montavista, and Blackberry maker RIM bid on QNX Software Systems.
The reason for this software development buying spree is presumably because it is rather a lot easier to buy an integrated embedded software solution or real-time operating systems (RTOSes) than it is for companies to program their own variety of Linux flavors for ever more complicated multicore processors.
Even for Freescale’s army of around 1,000 software developers, the task is a daunting one, and it’s a well-known fact that a problem shared is a problem halved.
So Freesclae is sharing its software issues with its three newest partners, as it marches down the yellow brick road towards a brighter embedded software partnership future.
This future entails sharing intellectual property, jointly investing in product and technology roadmaps and collaborating on go-to-market activities.
Freescale’s QorIQ, PowerQuicc and StarCore processors will be the main benefactors of the new software surge – hopefully seeing improvements in performance levels, ease-of-use and energy efficiency – with future software partner alliances to be announced further down the road.
Freescale says it plans to use Mentor’s System Builder Linux variant to replace its own, whilst the firm will also work closely with Enea to optimize its OSE, OSEck, Optima Tools and similar software for PowerQuicc, QorIQ and StarCore chips. With Green Hills, Freescale says it will push ahead with Integrity RTOS, C/C++ compilers, debugging tools and probes for PowerQuicc and QorIQ.
In return, Freescale will be sharing the pearls of its LTE wisdom as well as helping its new partners with packet processing acceleration. A real team effort.
Meanwhile, some in the industry see the move as a face-off with Intel’s newly acquired Wind River Systems, which has until now supplied most of Freescale’s customers.
It remains to be seen whether Wind River’s new allegiance to Intel will allow the firm to keep developing for others in the ecosystem, or whether it will be locked to Intel’s x86 stack.
