Company History

TRANGO Virtual Processors, headquartered in France, is a leading provider of embedded processor virtualization solutions, licensing virtualization IP to major semiconductor and device manufacturers. The company's products help customers create robust security architectures, deploy new value-added services, and reduce development and bill of materials costs.

Company's Primary Business Model

The company follows typical software industry business models, with flexible pricing that varies in relation to the product's ASP and expected volumes.

Company Objective

The TRANGO Hypervisor leverages the ARM processors' capabilities by creating multiple virtual processors running securely and simultaneously on a single CPU. Each virtual processor can execute a rich operating system (such as Linux or Windows CETM), a real-time operating system, or a stand-alone driver or application. In practical terms, that means that the software executing within each environment behaves as though it is the sole owner and proprietor of the SoC, when in fact, execution is occurring on a virtual representation of the underlying hardware.

This creates a rich set of design possibilities. For example, this makes it possible to run multiple heterogeneous operating systems; such as an RTOS in one environment, a rich OS to drive the GUI and other user interfaces in another, and a security-oriented application such as DRM in a third. Previously this may have required two or three separate CPUs to meet the performance and security requirements of the system. Now, with virtualization, one can combine all of these functions into one core.

Primary Solution
The company provides, designs and markets secure virtualization solutions for embedded processors.

Target Markets?
TRANGO explains - "For each vertical market there's a different value proposition, as virtualization is an extremely general purpose technology.

For example, in point of sale terminals, there's typically one dedicated CPU subsystem for the magnetic card reader/keypad, and another for the user-facing display/GUI. Virtualization allows these two execution environments to be combined into one, saving a complete CPU along with its attendant memory subsystem. That's a significant savings in the bill of materials, and it's also a lot easier to develop software for a single platform than for two and enable them to communicate together.

In mobile phones there is of course value to device consolidation, but there is an additional benefit to having a highly modular approach to system integration. Once the handset maker has the base phone functionality working, integrating new features while not disturbing the existing validated code base can result in a huge savings in both time and effort.

In high reliability applications such as telecommunications, surveillance, or military/industrial, you can set up a spare virtual environment, boot an extra copy of the OS in that environment, and then "freeze" that environment. Then, if something bad happens in the active run-time environment, one can migrate active processes to the back-up OS, and not lose all of the time required to boot up. This same mechanism can be used to upgrade firmware in the background, validate the new image, and then migrate active process threads to the newly updated run-time image".

What is unique about your company's offerings?
The company has created the thinnest, lightest, and most secure hypervisor in the embedded industry. At between 25 and 30 Kbytes of code on an ARM processor, the TRANGO Hypervisor has been written in assembly language and literally appears as a virtual CPU to the operating system or software running on top of it. It represents a substantially smaller footprint than competing solutions: this unique competitive advantage makes our product highly reliable, efficient and certifiable.

Also, through the company's commitment to hard real-time design concepts, its developers have kept the performance overhead to 2% or less, making integration with an RTOS extremely straight-forward.

Finally, its architecture, the hypervisor, is the only code that runs in the CPU's supervisor mode, which makes the overall system very secure.

Company History with ARM

How long has the company been working with ARM?
The company has been working with ARM since October 2005, which coincides with it joining the ARM Connected Community and its initial hypervisor support for the ARM926 CPU.

Why have you chosen to work with ARM?
ARM is the undisputed leader of the embedded processor IP market. Furthermore, a key goal of our product is to interoperate with existing SoC and OEM designs, and working with ARM was the best opportunity to reach the largest customer base.

ARM technologies that TRANGO supports?
ARM Processors: ARM720T, ARM920T, ARM922T, ARM926EJ-S, ARM1020E, ARM1022E, ARM1026EJ-S, ARM1136J(F)-S, ARM1156T2(F)-S, ARM1176JZ(F)-S, ARM11 MPCore, Xscale.

Cortex™ processor family in 2008
TrustZone™ Technology

Do you have a specialist area as an ARM Partner?
TRANGO is specialized in embedded processor virtualization, coupled with an in-depth knowledge of CPU and SoC design; this unique knowledge provides the company with a key competitive advantage. It also enables its mutual customers to fully benefit from ARM CPUs' powerful features, coupled with the outstanding benefits virtualization delivers, such as security, core consolidation, rapid software provisioning, and more efficient resource utilization, TRANGO explained.

How does TRANGO work as an ARM licensee?
TRANGO works very closely with ARM as a partner, including technical as well as marketing collaboration. For example, the company recently ported its hypervisor to the ARM11 MPCore, and received invaluable assistance from ARM's engineering team in the process. TRANGO has also issued several joint press releases, and it has recently shared the podium for presentations at the ARM Developer's Conference and the ARM Paris Technical Symposium. TRANGO has found the Connected Community program to be an extremely valuable element in our marketing efforts.

What one experience comes to mind during your early years working with ARM?
John Goodacre, ARM Multiprocessing Program Manager, personally provided the company with evaluation boards and technical support to enable its ARM11 MPCore demonstration at the ARM Developer's Conference 2007. "That kind of support, for a relatively small company like ours, speaks volumes about the level of commitment ARM has made to its Connected Community partners", TRANGO said.

Can you name any end products that your/ARM technology is being shipped with?
TRANGO is currently integrating its hypervisor into a point of sales terminal and several mobile phones. For confidentiality reasons, it is not allowed to disclose its customers or their products, until they are ready to publicly announce them.

For more on the ARM Connected Community and Trango go to:

ARM Connected Community http://www.arm.com/community
TRANGO Virtual Processors: http://www.trango-vp.com