[By NBc-TV E. H Kim]Freescale Semiconductor is expanding its successful VortiQa networking software product line beyond traditional security and networking functionality. To help speed development and boost performance of embedded software for Freescale’s highly advanced multicore QorIQ and QorIQ Qonverge products, Freescale is introducing the VortiQa™ Platform Services Package (PSP), the industry’s first comprehensive embedded networking software framework for programming in the Linux® user space.

VortiQa PSP streamlines development by minimizing bare-metal coding tasks and shifting more application development to the familiar Linux user space. This expands the pool of qualified software candidates and allows for faster, higher quality and more cost-efficient applications.

VortiQa PSP is ideal for the development of embedded networking products including enterprise routers, security appliances, application optimization devices, web application firewalls, wireless infrastructure devices and data center appliances such as application delivery controllers.

“We are pleased to offer our customers this comprehensive embedded user space software framework with our newest VortiQa software package,” said Sathyan Iyengar, vice president of Software Products for Freescale’s Networking and Multimedia Solutions Group. “With the increased sophistication of multicore processors such as Freescale’s QorIQ products, user space programming minimizes development efforts, helps to unleash the full performance potential of our products and reduces overall total costs of software development and maintenance.”

The new solution provides developers an abstraction layer for software development targeting Freescale’s data path acceleration architecture (DPAA) –highly advanced technology integrated into the company’s QorIQ multicore processors. In addition to speeding software creation, VortiQa PSP also allows developers to migrate software to QorIQ products, and helps to mitigate potential licensing situations that exist with loadable kernel modules (LKM) used to support new hardware in the Linux OS.