12 April 2005

Green Hills Expands Automotive Industry Initiative

Green Hills Software, Inc. is rolling out a major automotive industry initiative addressing the increasing software complexity of powertrain, body/safety and infotainment electronic control units (ECU).

With the rapidly increasing number of microprocessors embedded in today's cars, the importance of software in automobiles is growing. Green Hills Software's solutions enable automotive software developers to provide increased functionality while reducing development costs and fully exploiting new features of modern, highly integrated 32-bit processors.

Total reliability, maximum performance and the lowest possible manufacturing cost are key requirements for applications in the powertrain and body/safety solutions sector, which control engines and transmissions, safety systems and communication gateways.

Green Hills Software's compilers are highly optimized to the popular processor architectures used in powertrain and body/safety electronics, such as, ARM, V850, PowerPC and Blackfin. Green Hills Compilers produce the smallest code and fastest execution speed of any compiler in the industry, as consistently demonstrated in benchmarks certified and published by the independent Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC). The small code size enables manufacturers to use less memory, resulting in lower manufacturing cost. Fast execution allows ECU manufacturers to add more features without requiring use of a faster, more expensive processor.

Green Hills Compilers also enforce the Motor Industry Software Reliability Association (MISRA) guidelines for the creation of safe, reliable in-vehicle software.

Green Hills Software's MULTI Integrated Development Environment and hardware-assisted debugging probes provide a complete environment to develop, debug and optimize automotive software. The SuperTrace Probe and TimeMachine Debugger have revolutionized debugging by allowing software developers to analyze trace data captured in real-time using a familiar application debugger, without interfering with the processor's execution. Green Hills Software also offers a cost effective (royalty free), scalable and reliable software solutions for developers of in-car infotainment systems.

In addition Green Hills Software maintains its solutions offer the most scalable family of embedded real-time operating systems, allowing manufacturers to share source code across a range of products with diverse functionality and cost requirements. This preserves suppliers' software investment across car models, model years, and manufacturers.

The velOSity microkernel is a small, fast operating system that is ideal for cost-sensitive, resource-constrained systems. Built on velOSity, the INTEGRITY real-time operating system takes advantage of the memory protection capability built-in to most processors in order to provide total reliability and absolute security for open and connected systems. The INTEGRITY operating system is also certified conformant to the standard POSIX application programming interface. Both INTEGRITY and velOSity are royalty-free.

The velOSity and INTEGRITY operating systems have fast boot times, which can be lower than 20 milliseconds, allowing systems to respond to the stringent requirements of the in-car bus. They also share common device drivers and a rich set of available middleware that satisfies the requirements of next-generation infotainment applications, including speech recognition, text-to-speech, echo cancellation and noise reduction, Bluetooth, GPS, navigation, MP3, graphics, USB, file system, networking, CAN, MOST and more.