Green Hills Software, the largest independent vendor of embedded software solutions, has announced a strategic partnership with Freescale Semiconductor to offer optimised products and services for developers of functional safety and general-purpose applications on the PX series of microcontrollers. Manufacturers of industrial, avionic, railway and medical devices now have the freedom to choose from a range of silicon, software and safety architecture services that best match their technical and business goals.
“Our PX series of microcontrollers provide unmatched performance and ruggedised safety features across many industries,” said Dr. Reza Kazerounian, vice president and general manager of the Automotive and Industrial Systems Group at Freescale Semiconductor. “Green Hills is the natural recommended software partner because their optimised products and services give our customers a range of solutions – from general-purpose to safety-certified.”
As the infrastructure of society becomes more reliant on software, embedded device manufacturers are consolidating more functionality, automating more tasks, and in some cases, facing new government safety regulations, to bring convenience, efficiency and reliability to their customers. Embedded designers require a range of hardware and software building blocks from which to dial in the right combination of features, safety and business models. Together, Freescale and Green Hills now offer customers a synergistic hardware and software platform to build and deploy optimised devices – ranging from general-purpose to those requiring the highest level of safety certification.
By adding the PX series to its supported portfolio, Green Hills now provides a unique family of real-time operating systems, optimised code generation for the e200 CPU core, advanced trace-enabled multicore development tools, rich graphical and communication middleware and embedded expert services. For applications that require high reliability or certified functional safety, customers can choose from the pre-certified INTEGRITY® RTOSor certifiable µ-velOSity™-based safety BSPs, safety-qualified development tools, and embedded expert safety consulting, meeting the highest safety levels of IEC 61508 SIL 3 (industrial), ISO 26262 ASIL-D (automotive), DO-178B Level A (avionics) or EN 50128 SWSIL 4 (railway).
“Our product and services portfolio addresses a wide spectrum of PX use cases,” said Dan Mender, vice president of business development at Green Hills Software. “One use case is INTEGRITY as the trusted foundation for general-purpose applications. Another is for stringent safety applications, where the INTEGRITY RTOS’ certification to IEC 61508 SIL 3 and unique separation architecture allows consolidation of software at varying safety integrity levels on a single device. At the other end of the spectrum is the ultra-small µ-velOSity for applications with constrained resources or less complexity. Both INTEGRITY and µ-velOSity share a common API for system calls, common middleware and optimised development tools, which means customers can retain their software investment longer and across more of their product family.”
Freescale’s PX series of microcontrollers utilize the proven Power Architecture® e200 core and come in both single and multicore implementations with up to 600 DMIPS of performance and up to 4MB of integrated flash memory. Each of the six PX family members uniquely address either graphics, analog, networking or safety-critical applications through a focused set of peripherals, or in the case of the PX S20, through a pre-certified safety and environmental architecture.
Availability
Green Hills and Freescale today offer their respective solutions for all six PX series microcontrollers: PX D10, D20, N20, R40, S20 and S30, and a free 30-day evaluation CD of the Green Hills MULTI® IDE is bundled in the Freescale Tower Board.
About Green Hills Software
Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software is the largest independent vendor of embedded development solutions. In 2008, the Green Hills INTEGRITY-178B RTOS was the first and only operating system to be certified by NIAP (National Information Assurance Partnership comprised of NSA & NIST) to EAL6+, High Robustness, the highest level of security ever achieved for any software product. Our open architecture integrated development solutions address deeply embedded, absolute security and high-reliability applications for the military/avionics, medical, industrial, automotive, networking, consumer and other markets that demand industry-certified solutions. Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, with European headquarters in the United Kingdom. Visit Green Hills Software atwww.ghs.com.
