News & Press

Green Hills Software Expands Industry Leading IEC 61508 Platform for Industrial Safety

Significant Feature Enhancements for Platforms' SIL3-Certified INTEGRITY Operating System


SANTA BARBARA, CA—August 4, 2009—Green Hills Software, Inc., the world leader in platform-independent embedded software solutions, today announced major enhancement to its Platform for Industrial Safety, adding support for the Green Hills Secure Virtualization Architecture and expanding the existing networking, file system and target hardware options. Certified by TÜV to Safety Integrity Level 3 (SIL3) of the IEC 61508 safety standard, SIL3 is the highest assurance level achievable for an individual software component, such as an operating system.

"Based on our customers' feedback and future design directions and requirements, we invested time and resources to offer this important update to our Platform for Industrial Safety," commented Dan Mender, vice president business development, Green Hills Software. "With these enhancements, Green Hills continues to deliver the industry's most reliable and flexible solution for customers to build their safety-critical devices and infrastructure on, providing for the shortest time-to-market at a lower development and deployment cost."

The certified INTEGRITY® operating system technology forms the core of the Green Hills Platform for Industrial Safety, a comprehensive solution comprised of tools, operating systems, secure guest OS virtualization, services, and middleware aimed at reliability-critical industrial control, transportation, railway, nuclear control and automation systems. By utilizing our certified operating system, available middleware and support services, customers reduce their development cost and time to certify their end products.

Green Hills Platform for Industrial Safety now offers expanded support for:

  • Secure Virtualization Architecture
  • New target processors, such as OMAP35x processors from Texas Instruments (TI) and ARM® Cortex™-A8
  • Additional reference board support packages
  • Wireless supplicant support (WPA/WPA2)
  • Partitionable journaling file system (PJFS)
  • Enhanced Wear Leveling Flash file system support
  • Expanded TCP/IP v4/v6 networking stack, security protocols, and networking applications
  • Enhanced USB host stack, device stack and communications class drivers

The innovative secure partitioning capability of INTEGRITY enables software, from non safety-related through safety-critical, to be safely partitioned on a single processor. Each partition can then be certified at its appropriate Safety Integrity Level, eliminating the need for separate physical systems or to certify code beyond the required safety level. With Green Hills' processor-independent certification, customers have a wide range of options to choose from allowing unmatched design flexibility compared to alternative approaches, and resulting in reduced overall system complexity, product and certification cost.

Green Hills Software's operating systems have a long history of use in electronic products requiring the highest levels of reliability and assurance. In addition to its certification to IEC 61508 SIL3, DO-178B Level A for flight-critical avionics and its use in FDA/CDRH Class II and Class III life-critical medical devices, INTEGRITY RTOS technology is the first operating system to receive security certification at assurance level EAL6+ of the Common Criteria, the highest level ever achieved for any software.

The Green Hills Software Platform for Industrial Safety delivers the following components: INTEGRITY and velOSity™ real-time operating systems (RTOS), with certification by TÜV to the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) EN 61508 standard at Safety Integrity Level 3 (SIL3); a safety manual; SIL3 certification certificate and report; MULTI Confidence-from-Use report (optional).

"Green Hills consistently delivers high-quality software that enables our industrial customers to easily take advantage of the flexibility and performance of TI OMAP35x processors," said Ram Sathappan, industrial computing manager, TI. "These advances in their RTOS running on OMAP35x devices will help customers building programmable automation controllers attain their safety certification easier and faster."

About IEC 61508
IEC 61508 is an international standard for the functional safety of electrical, electronic, programmable electronic (E/E/PE), and safety-related systems and applies to these systems regardless of their applications. IEC 61508 is the basis for a published nuclear sector standard (IEC 61513). It is also currently being used as the basis for developing other sector standards (e.g. machinery, process IEC 61511), along with standards in Railway (EN 50128/CENELEC) and automotive (ISO 26262, draft). It is therefore influencing the development of E/E/PE safety-related systems and products across all industry sectors, where safety and reliability are paramount. Meeting the well defined, stringent IEC 61508 requirements involves supporting a systematic development process, emphasizing requirements traceability, criticality analysis and validation. The SIL3 rating is considered the highest level of risk reduction achievable using a single processor.

Availability
Green Hills Platform for Industrial Safety, including the IEC 61508 certified INTEGRITY and velOSity operating systems, safety manual, certification report and copy of the certification itself has been available since 2006 on a wide variety of microprocessor architectures. The enhancements mentioned are available today. IEC 61508 certification artifacts, including design, planning, and verification documentation, along with a Confidence-from-Use report for the Green Hills MULTI® IDE and compilers are optionally available today as well.

About Green Hills Software
Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software, Inc. is the technology leader in platform-independent embedded development solutions. In 2008, the Green Hills INTEGRITY-178B RTOS was the first and only operating system to be certified by the NSA to EAL6+ High Robustness, the highest level of security ever achieved. Our platform-agnostic integrated development solutions address both deeply embedded 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 at www.ghs.com.

About the Texas Instruments Developer Network
Green Hills Software is a member of the TI Developer Network, a community of respected, well-established companies offering products and services based on TI analog and digital technology. The Network provides a broad range of end-equipment solutions, embedded software, engineering services and development tools that help customers accelerate innovation to make the world smarter, healthier, safer, greener and more fun. www.ti.com/dspdevnetwork

Green Hills, the Green Hills logo, MULTI, INTEGRITY, velOSity, µ-velOSity, AdaMULTI, DoubleCheck and TimeMachine are trademarks or registered trademarks of Green Hills Software, Inc. in the U.S. and/or internationally. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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