Wind River and soft IP

I’m racing to keep up with Wind River this week. Just after I finished chatting with Wind River and Intel about new multicore support in the embedded world, for a story on Dev-Monkey, Wind River announced it is offering Linux support for Altera Corp.’s Nios II embedded processor.

Sure, any given week will feature some kind of announcement between an FPGA vendor and a specialist in RTOS or embedded Linux realms. The significant factor here is the slow maturation of the soft processor core. The Nios architecture, along with Xilinx Inc.’s MicroBlaze, has been making steady inroads against hard implementations of architectures such as PowerPC and ARM.

But “steady inroads” does not equal dominance. Many FPGA designers still feel more comfortable with the known performance parameters of a particular generation of ARM or other RISC.  In fact, recent comments in FPGA Gurus suggest a particular Achilles Heel of the soft processor is the fact that a standard, packaged version of the processor, complete with evaluation kits, does not exist. In theory, the soft families allow more flexibility in implementation, provided designers feel comfortable with the tool set. That’s why Linux ports from the likes of Wind River are a much-needed vote of confidence that may help spur broader use of cores like Nios and MicroBlaze in future designs.