SAN FRANCISCO—EDA vendor Mentor Graphics Corp. said Monday (April 16) it would place the front-end Unified Modeling Language (UML) editor of its
BridgePoint xtUML environment into the open-source domain.
Mentor (Wilsonville, Ore.) said it was taking this action to provide the system design community with broader access to comprehensive UML editing capabilities, encouraging advancement to model-driven development.
UML is a graphical and textual way to describe systems that has been standardized by the
Object Management Group, a not-for-profit consortium of users and vendors dedicated to interoperability of object-oriented systems.
According to Mentor, UML entry provides a starting point for model-driven flows, which improve a company's ability to capture design intent, validate requirements, communicate and manage data, reuse intellectual property and generate downstream implementations.
BridgePoint is an xtUML-based environment built upon the Eclipse IDE platform. The term xtUML indicates extensions to the standard UML, which enables execution of the UML model to verify its behavior along with translation of the UML into downstream implementation languages such as C, C++, SystemC and others, while supporting interface standards, Mentor said.
"Open source has already reduced barriers to entry for modeling tools," said Stephen Mellor, originator of the modeling methodology that underlies BridgePoint xtUML, in a statement issued by Mentor Monday. "Making BridgePoint open source now extends this benefit to users of executable and translatable UML, while allowing them to continue to gain from the extensive expertise captured by MGC's model compilers and verification tools."
Also Monday, Mentor announced the release 10.1 release of its Questa functional verification platform for SoCs and FPGAs. The new release provides increased simulation and verification performance, enhanced support of the Universal Verification Methodology, accelerated coverage closure and low power verification with the comprehensive Unified Power Format (UPF) support, Mentor said.