Green Hills Software Announces INTEGRITY(TM) Real-Time Operating System For ARM Processors

Protects Kernel and Applications from Errant Code, Viruses and Hackers

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 13, 2002--Green Hills Software today announced the availability of its INTEGRITY(TM) 4.0 real-time operating system for the ARM® family of processors, including the ARM720T(TM) core, the ARM920T(TM) core, the ARM922T(TM) cores and the ARM® architecture-compliant Intel® XScale(TM) microarchitecture.

INTEGRITY provides full memory protection and guaranteed resource availability, while still delivering a worst-case interrupt latency of less than 200 nsec, and a worst-case context switching time of less than a microsecond. This unique combination makes INTEGRITY a secure, ultra-reliable, high-performance target environment for deploying embedded ARM applications in a variety of networked, consumer electronics products.

Most ARM processors include a memory management unit (MMU) that can protect user tasks from each other and prevent unintended access to the kernel. However, very few RTOS products for ARM support the MMU. As a result, these products offer no protection against errant code. This lack of protection can allow application bugs free reign to affect not only the application, but the entire system, ultimately causing a kernel crash. By contrast, INTEGRITY's modern architecture provides full support for the ARM MMU, offering tremendous protection for today's security-focused, network environment.

"INTEGRITY's memory protected architecture, guaranteed resource availability and fast, deterministic, hard real-time response make it the most secure and reliable RTOS solution on the market today, and the only royalty-free, memory-protected commercial RTOS," said John Carbone, vice president of marketing at Green Hills Software. "Now, designers of ARM Powered® applications, who already enjoy the productivity and code optimization benefits of our MULTI® Integrated Development Environment (IDE) can deploy ARM applications on the most reliable RTOS, with full I/O, networking and debug support, without paying royalties."

"This RTOS provides an attractive protected memory, multi-tasking solution for the high-performance, low-cost, low-power market areas where ARM technology is deployed," added Rod Crawford, director of third-party software products for ARM.

INTEGRITY is a fast, deterministic, real-time operating system designed for applications that require high reliability, availability, security and testability. Utilizing the hardware memory protection facilities of ARM MMUs, INTEGRITY builds a firewall between the kernel and user tasks that prevents errant or malicious tasks from corrupting user data, the kernel, interprocess communications, device drivers and other user tasks. INTEGRITY also enhances reliability and determinism by running with interrupts continuously enabled and guaranteeing access to the CPU and memory for critical tasks. Other RTOS solutions do not offer this protection or security, leaving systems vulnerable to failure from a single errant application, virus or hacker attack.

INTEGRITY provides comprehensive I/O and file system support, including a USB stack, NFS client, drivers for I2C, CompactPCI/VMEbus backplanes, clocks, timers and standard PC peripherals, and a full-featured, UNIX-compatible, hierarchical file system. Networking support includes a TCP/IP stack, Gigabit Ethernet driver, and the full line of Trillium communications protocols, including SS7, ATM, ISDN, Frame Relay, MPLS, VoIP and 3G wireless. INTEGRITY also supports the full line of InterNiche and Allegro embedded Internet products, which make it easy to add Web connectivity and management to embedded systems.

INTEGRITY is tightly integrated with Green Hills' MULTI IDE. Together with Green Hills' family of optimizing C, C++ and EC++, compilers, MULTI automates all aspects of embedded software development for ARM processors, including editing, source-level debugging, program building, run-time error checking, version control and code/performance optimization. MULTI also features ISIM, an INTEGRITY simulator that enables programmers to develop and test their code on a PC or workstation without the need for target hardware.

The MULTI debugger enables programmers to simultaneously debug multiple INTEGRITY tasks across multiple address spaces task, whether those processes reside on a single processor, or are distributed across multiple processors. MULTI automatically activates a new debugger window when a process is created, and provides a process roster window for tracking process and choosing which process to debug. Through MULTI, programmers can set process-specific and address-space-wide breakpoints, and monitor/record I/O and interprocess communications. They can also perform execution profiling at the process, address space or system level to precisely pinpoint performance bottlenecks.

INTEGRITY's graphical Resource Analyzer greatly enhances visibility into applications and the kernel as they execute on the target system, displaying CPU execution at the task and address space level, stack usage for tasks, and memory use for address spaces. INTEGRITY's real-time EventAnalyzer(TM) further enhances real-time visibility by enabling programmers to log and monitor system and application events in real time without disrupting program execution. Operating like a high-level logic analyzer, the EventAnalyzer displays all INTEGRITY context switches, API calls, and interrupts in a time-relative manner using intuitive ICONs. The EventAnalyzer is also tightly integrated with Rational's RoseRT, enabling programmers to view RoseRT state transitions and INTEGRITY events.

INTEGRITY is available immediately for ARM core-based solutions, including the Intel XScale microarchitecture, and works out of the box with a variety of popular ARM core-based evaluation boards, including Cirrus Logic's EDB72xx board based on the ARM720T core, Sharp's Reference Board based on the ARM922T core, and Intel's IQ80310 XScale board. Green Hills also offers a porting kit and turnkey porting services for designers who want to port INTEGRITY to other platforms.

Development licenses for the INTEGRITY RTOS, including a board support package, start at $15,000 per product. Run-time licenses for INTEGRITY on the target system are free.