DÜSSELDORF (Germany), January 14, 2010 — NEC Electronics Europe today announced the release of the 78K0 Lighting Communications demonstration kit, enabling lighting ballast designers to adopt lighting specific communications such as DALI and DMX512. The kit includes a master communication controller board which provides interfaces and supports communications to lighting slave devices by DMX512, DALI and even IrDA for remote lighting controls including dimming. The board populates connectors for the supported interfaces and can be easily connected to the recently released 78K0/IX2 LED demonstration kit or any other lighting slave controller in a network supporting DALI or DMX152 standards.

Two very comprehensive software tools, the DALI Master GUI controller and the DMX512 Master GUI controller, are included in the 78K0 Lighting Communications kit,. By connecting the board to a PC using the provided USB cable, the light output of a slave device such as 78K0/IX2 LED kit can be remotely controlled by using the easy-to-use GUI tools, depending whether the boards are connected via DALI or DMX512 interfaces between them.

The DALI Master Controller GUI allows users to implement real time control of the light output and to benefit from a number of effective features such as power control settings for dimming and turning the lights on and off, or setting maximum and minimum dimming levels while the system is running. All dimming levels can be specified without difficulty in the graphical tool. Users can also design scenes and even specify the fade settings such as fade rate and time once the addresses of the slave devices are set.

The DMX512 Master Controller GUI provides users with the content of the DMX512 protocol, helps to understand its concept and allows graphically designing mixed color scenes and flashing sequences. Once the slave addresses are specified, designers can simply step through each scene they created manually or run in real time at the rate they specified. This tool brings an efficient way of lighting system design and debugging on application level. Scene data can also be saved or loaded into CSV format for later use.

Documentation and the user’s manuals for both tools are included in the 78K0 Lighting Communications kit. The 78K0 Lighting Communications kit, 78K0-LIGHTCOMMS, is available now. 

About NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH 

NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH, headquartered in Duesseldorf, Germany, is a leading developer and supplier of semiconductor products in Europe. Committed to meeting customers’ cost, performance and time-to-market requirements, the company offers solutions ranging from standard products to system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions, as well as customized products for next-generation designs. Our customers also benefit from state-of-the-art manufacturing from the global production network of our parent company, NEC Electronics Corporation. Additionally, NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH is the exclusive European sales and marketing channel of LCD modules from NEC LCD Technologies Ltd.. For more information visit http://www.eu.necel.com .

WILSONVILLE, Ore.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Mentor Graphics Corp. (NASDAQ:MENT), the leader in high-performance system verification solutions, today announced a hardware-assisted solution to accelerate the verification of Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 products, including hard disk drives and other mass storage devices. This new solution enables designers to test the System-on-Chip (SoC) design that controls a hard disk drive or similar mass storage device, by providing an accurate, hardware-based model of the real disk drive connected to their SoC.

This iSolve^™ USB Peripheral product has a ‘plug-and-play’ interface to the Veloce^® family of hardware-assisted emulators, providing a cost-effective and efficient solution to verify USB designs. The new product adds to the existing iSolve family of solutions for the accelerated verification of applications such as multimedia, networking, embedded systems, wireless, and storage devices.

USB is a pervasive technology across a wide range of products, with billions of devices having been created that use the protocol. With the ever-increasing demand for system-level verification of such products, a heavy burden is placed on SoC designers who need to verify how their designs interact with the USB devices connected to them.

“New consumer products, in particular, are increasingly dependent on the use of the latest-generation USB devices, and design engineers are concerned with the quick and efficient verification of their SoC designs that will connect to these devices,” said Jim Kenney, director of marketing, Mentor’s Emulation Division. “We took a new approach to solve these challenges with our iSolve USB Peripheral product, by providing a flexible, easy-to-use, and highly-configurable USB peripheral device model. This gives our customers the ability to verify multiple configurations and descriptions of USB peripheral devices—all with the same emulator solution—rather than needing many specific devices.”

Combined with the Veloce emulation family, the iSolve USB Peripheral product delivers a high-performance and easy-to-use system verification environment to develop new SoCs containing a USB host controller, without compromising delivery schedules. The solution offers several key benefits:

• Easy-to-use configuration tool means users are able to parameterize their USB mass storage device quickly and start their SoC verification as soon as possible
• Productive debug environment provides access to low-level transactions to detect those hard-to-find bugs
• High-speed data accesses allows loading or unloading of GBytes of data in minutes rather than hours.
• Compliant to USB 2.0 standard

The iSolve USB Peripheral solution can be used with traditional in-circuit emulation (ICE) as well as a high-performance, transaction-based acceleration mode of operation. The ability to mix and match traditional ICE capabilities with high-performance transaction-based acceleration facilitates the smooth transition from a simulation-centric use model to in-circuit emulation. The solution is available for deployment at customer sites effective immediately.

For product information, contact your Mentor Graphics sales representative, call 1-800-547-3000, or visit the website at www.mentor.com/med.

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 electronics and semiconductor companies. Established in 1981, the company reported revenues over the last 12 months of about $800 million and employs approximately 4,425 people worldwide. Corporate headquarters are located at 8005 S.W. Boeckman Road, Wilsonville, Oregon 97070-7777. World Wide Web site:http://www.mentor.com/.