Press Releases

Enea to Support Multicore Association’s MCAPI™ Standard

Interprocess Process Communications Leader will Integrate Emerging Multicore Communications Standard with its Enea LINX IPC

STOCKHOLM, Embedded World, Nürnberg, Germany; March 1, 2011 – Enea today announced that it is supporting the Multicore Associations emerging Multicore Communications API (MCAPI™) standard by implementing MCAPI over its Enea LINX interprocess communications (IPC) solution to insure interoperability between closely coupled processing and multicore devices.  The technology behind LINX has been deployed in over 1.7 billion devices including telecom equipment, automobiles and mobile devices.  In addition Enea, a long-time member of the Multicore Association, will join and participate in the consortium’s MCAPI Working Group to help guide the long-term development of the standard.

MCAPI is an evolving message passing standard sponsored under the auspices of the Multicore Association. The MCAPI API specification is designed to capture the basic elements of communication and synchronization that are required for closely distributed (multiple cores on a chip and/or chips on a board) embedded systems. Although MCAPI currently specifies an API to applications, it leaves the implementation of the underlying protocol to MCAPI implementers. This guarantees compatibility for application code, but does not guarantee interoperability across MCAPI endpoints or nodes in a system, be it a multicore device or a set of heterogeneous or homogeneous CPUs. Enea’s LINX already provides a proven and open interoperable protocol across all devices, all interconnects, and all OS/RTOS environments.  Enea is implementing MCAPI API standard over its existing LINX protocol, thereby offering the market an MCAPI API solution that is interoperable between all nodes, interconnects and OS/RTOS platforms. The LINX protocols specification as well as the open source reference implementation for Linux is available at SourceForge.net.

“Recently, there has been much interest in MCAPI in the market, especially with silicon vendors,” said Marcus Hjortsberg, vice president of marketing at Enea.  “Silicon vendors, and indeed the overall embedded industry, want an ecosystem that supports application compatibility as well as interoperability for IPC solutions, and not point solutions from multiple vendors. Enea recognizes this trend and therefore has decided to join the MCAPI initiative.”

”The MCAPI Working Group has just recently re-engaged to define and develop a subsequent version of this Multicore Association specification,” said Markus Levy, Multicore Association president. “Enea, based on its many years of experience with LINX, will provide tremendous value to this working group effort. In addition, we encourage others in the embedded community to join the Multicore Association and participate in one or more of our other multicore-related working groups.”

Enea is currently demonstrating MCAPI over LINX to partners and customers.  Enea has been working closely with Freescale and has developed a demonstration on a Freescale AMC board consisting of a P2020 QorIQ processor with an MSC8156 DSP that shows communications between multiple OSs including Linux, Enea OSE and OSEck, both within a multicore device as well as between heterogeneous devices over multiple interconnects.