Enea to Support MCAPI Standard

Enea, a global software and services company focused on solutions for communication-driven products, 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.

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.

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