How to Choose the Best Real Time Operating System

Select a safe RTOS vendor

The real time operating system is the most critical component of your electronic product. It controls every aspect of your product's operation as well as its reliability and security. When you select an RTOS you are betting your success on the success of the RTOS vendor. If your RTOS vendor goes out of business, you will have to switch vendors. This will be expensive and it will delay your development efforts. Half of the top ten RTOS vendors have gone out of business, been acquired, or abandoned the RTOS business in the last few years. Several more are in deep financial trouble. The following simple rules allow you to avoid selecting an RTOS vendor that will go out of business soon:

• Never choose a vendor that is less than 5 years old
• Never choose a vendor that is losing money
• Never choose a vendor with a shrinking market share
• Never choose a vendor that has no technology

Select commercial software development tools

When you select an RTOS you are also selecting its software development tools. Compared to "free" software development tools, the best commercial software development tools can slash your time to market and your development cost. They can also boost the performance, reliability, and capability of your electronic product. The compiler that comes with your RTOS determines the amount of memory and the speed of the processor that your product will require. The increase in the manufacturing cost of your product caused by a "free" compiler relative to the best commercial compiler usually dwarfs the cost of the compiler. The increase in your costs associated with using "free" software development tools is so large that you can't afford anything less than the best software development tools. Free software is too expensive.

We offer the most productive and the most popular commercial embedded software development tools. We also offer the best and the most popular commercial embedded compilers.

Select the most reliable RTOS

If reliability is the paramount concern for your electronic product, you must buy the most reliable RTOS. Our INTEGRITY RTOS is the world's most reliable RTOS.

Select an RTOS with affordable source code

If you don't have source code for your RTOS, you must incorporate (into the heart of your application) hundreds of thousands of bytes of binary code that your programmers can't understand, modify, or debug. Your whole programming team may have to sit around all weekend waiting for your RTOS vendor to answer an easy question that your programmers could have figured out in a few minutes from the source code. Your whole programming team may be stuck for weeks after a bug has been fixed waiting for your vendor to complete a full product release when you could have gotten back to work immediately if you could have accepted a source code patch.

Affordable source code is available for the INTEGRITY real-time operating system and source code is included with the µ-velOSity real-time microkernel.

Select an RTOS whose users think well of it

Before choosing an RTOS find out who else is using the RTOS in similar applications. Find out what customers who have had long experience with the RTOS say about the RTOS and how well the vendor treats its customers after they buy.

See what our customers say about our products and support.

Select an advanced RTOS technology

As RTOS technology advances it rapidly obsoletes older technologies. RTOS technology is critical to your competitiveness because it determines the reliability, performance, and time to market for your electronic products. An RTOS vendor that has not been able to keep up with the pace of technological advance will only fall farther and farther behind as time goes on. In a high technology business you can't succeed forever having to compensate for an ever-increasing disadvantage imposed on you by a stagnant and obsolete RTOS technology. The RTOS company with the most advanced technology gives you the biggest advantage in the market. Furthermore, its lead in RTOS expertise will allow it to continue to advance the state of the art, maintaining your advantage over your competition.

INTEGRITY has the most advanced RTOS technology.

Green Hills Software's RTOS Solutions

Green Hills Software is the most successful RTOS business. We have been in business for over twenty-years and we have made a profit for the last twenty-eight consecutive years. Green Hills Software has the most advanced RTOS technology and the most reliable RTOS, giving Green Hills Software the fastest growing RTOS market share.

But most important of all to any prospective customer, our current customers think well of us.