To go along with all the Silicon we saw, there was also a lot of Software news at ESC, including some developments that really have a big potential impact. We break it down into operating systems, tools, and middleware for a closer look and some interesting insights from the insiders.

The big news of the week was the announcement from Mentor Graphics and Freescale on their cooperation for Linux[] support on QorIQ, PowerQUICC, and StarCore processor families. Let’s take a few words from the slides Glenn Perry and Raja Tabet spoke to: “unprecedented levels of cooperation across the entire silicon lifecycle (IP sharing, go-to-market partnership, joint investments in technology and product roadmaps).” This is potentially a huge timesaver for customers – not just support for silicon, but support at release on a commercial ready package with complete feature support designed in from inside knowledge. There’s no changeover from a semiconductor-firm Linux reference platform to a shippable Linux platform – it’s the same thing now. We were wondering why Freescale didn’t make an acquisition in the Linux space; this explains things now, and while both firms work together closely they also retain independence to maintain the rest of their ecosystems and customer relationships. (Whither CodeWarrior? Time will tell.)

Express Logic announced their Safety-Critical Certification Pack for ThreadX, enabling FDA 510(k) certifications by providing information on the operating system. John Carbon said customers have been doing this themselves, and it was some work but producing the needed artifacts was a straightforward operation that Express Logic could do once and enable many customers in the medical space.

Viosoft teams were also at the show, and we ran into them at the Marvell booth. We’ve seen them working closely with MIPS and their licensees on Android[] ports and development tools, and we’re looking for big things from them as Android catches on and grows in all kinds of applications.

Express Logic also announced their TraceX/MC package, the multicore[] version of their “software logic analyzer”. Since TraceX grabs breadcrumbs from ThreadX and places them into a circular buffer, extending the tool to support multicore was a logical and non-invasive extension. TraceX/MC graphs events in real-time and shows what exactly is going on in each core, including interrupts and context switches, providing much more visibility than other debug tools. For instance, race conditions between cores can be spotted easily in TraceX/MC.

Stonestreet One gave me a few minutes of fun at the show. During our meeting, Tim Reilly asked if I had any music on my Droid. Heh, 14 hours of Metallica, 4 hours of A7X, … we can knock down the booth next door if you want. So we walked over to their booth and paired my Droid with their A2DP embedded stack demo, and “Roam” sounded good immediately. On a more serious note, Stonestreet One has recently signed on as a member of the Continua Health Alliance, working on enabling Bluetooth in medical devices.

Atmel announced their BitCloud profile suite, implementing three ZigBee profiles: Smart Energy, Building Automation, and Home Automation. It’s a free download release, based on Atmel shipping “a few million parts” into these applications last year and expecting business to double this year. They are also previewing over-the-air (OTA) updates, and working on Smart Energy 2.0 and the possibilities for IP protocols.

Eurotech’s Arlen Nipper provided some interesting insight into their strategy. He’s been involved with IBM’s MQTT for some time, and it’s an interesting idea to couple embedded devices like smart sensors in industrial or medical settings with a proven IBM messaging infrastructure in WebSphere, which also runs the enterprise side of the house. He’s working on technology to be introduced, stay tuned.