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Green Hills Software and NXP Collaborate on Integrated Solutions Advancements for the New S32K5 Microcontroller Family

Joint solution delivers broad enablement for multicore, multi-function microcontroller with the latest in RTOS, hypervisor and advanced debug, reducing software development costs while accelerating time-to-production

SANTA BARBARA, CA — March 19, 2025 — Green Hills Software, the worldwide leader in embedded safety and security, today announced its collaboration with NXP® Semiconductors to provide a combined hardware and software solution for developing and deploying safety-focused, mixed-criticality SDV zonal architectures based on NXP’s new S32K5 MCU family. The software solution features the ASIL D safety-certified
µ-velOSity™ real-time operating system (RTOS), the µ-visor® hypervisor for MCUs, and the industry-leading Green Hills Compilers, and advanced MULTI® debugger with system visualization tools. This combination from NXP and Green Hills Software enables OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers to safely consolidate mixed-criticality ECU functions while reducing system complexity, lowering development cost and time-to-production while improving software reuse in new vehicle programs.

Emerging designs for next-generation vehicle electronics must adapt to accommodate the growth and consolidation of software features with advanced new electronics architectures. Customers require a flexible and performant compute platform that is able to safely consolidate hardware and software with freedom-from-interference while providing uncompromised real-time performance, lower cost, and more system reliability. In addition, time-to-market pressures require a software development environment that reduces the time and cost to develop, integrate, optimize, and deploy millions of lines of code in complex heterogenous multicore, multi-OS ECUs.

“As vehicle ECU functions are consolidated, automakers must ensure functional safety while reducing system complexity and development time,” says David Vieira, Senior Director, Automotive Zonal Solutions at NXP. “We’re pleased to partner with Green Hills to enable our new S32K5 MCU family with solutions to help automakers accelerate and streamline vehicle development without compromising on safety."

“Green Hills is thrilled to be working with NXP to provide early and extensive enablement for NXP’s latest microcontroller family, the S32K5,” said Dan Mender, Vice President, Business Development, Green Hills Software. “By using our comprehensive production-focused software solutions, customers can develop their next-generation zonal and domain controllers with the most performant, scalable, configurable offerings available, significantly reducing the time to production and cost to develop.”

This hardware/software solution is ideal for automotive applications targeting up to ISO 26262 ASIL D certification such as zone controllers, domain controllers, premium body and safety controllers. The S32K5 family of MCUs offers high performance, increased networking capability, and innovative hardware-enforced safety isolation – all at low power consumption. The production-focused software products and technologies from Green Hills provide the proven foundation for customers to efficiently develop and optimize their applications in next-generation SDV architectures.

Safe, Secure ECU Consolidation — With near-zero overhead, the Green Hills µ-visor hypervisor safely and securely consolidates multiple operating systems, such as AUTOSAR Classic or µ-velOSity, and their workloads in virtual machines. µ-visor can run one or more Guest OSes on a single Arm® Cortex®-R52 core with hardware-based enforcement to isolate Guest OSes and their applications.

Efficient & Performant — The µ-velOSity RTOS has a small footprint and simple programming model and can run on any of the S32K5’s Cortex-M7 or Cortex-R52 real-time cores. Green Hills Optimizing Compilers produce the smallest and highest performance code for Arm Cortex-M and Cortex-R cores. Together, they are the ultra-efficient software foundation to take advantage of the S32K5’s expanded performance.

Safety & Security — The S32K5 supports applications targeting ASIL D safety and ISO/SAE 21434 automotive cybersecurity. Likewise, the µ-velOSity RTOS and Green Hills Compilers and run-time libraries are certified to ISO 26262 ASIL D. Additionally, the safety team at Green Hills offers services to help customer design and certify their safety systems.

Find and Fix Bugs Faster — The MULTI integrated development environment (IDE) gives developers a unified view across all the running S32K5 real-time processor cores and OSes, such as AUTOSAR, FreeRTOS, or µ-velOSity, cutting development time and shortening time-to-production. Time-saving advanced features include multicore OS-aware debugging, trace-powered TimeMachine® back-in-time debugging, and the History® viewer of system events. To resolve software problems earlier, MULTI includes a MISRA C Adherence Wizard and DoubleCheck™ that automatically analyzes code during compilation, enabling engineers to detect and resolve problems more efficiently than stand-alone redundant-pass static code analyzers.

Complete Offering for NXP’s S32K5 MCU Family:

• µ-velOSity RTOS for certified ASIL D safety on the Cortex-M7 and Cortex-R52 real-time cores
• µ-visor hypervisor for concurrently hosting multiple AUTOSAR Classic, FreeRTOS, and µ-velOSity Guest OSes on the Cortex-R52 real-time cores
• OS-agnostic MULTI integrated development environment (IDE) with advanced back-in-time TimeMachine debugger and History intuitive graphical system viewer for software solutions from Green Hills, NXP, and NXP CoreRide partners running on the Cortex-M7 and Cortex-R52 real-time cores
• ASIL D Green Hills Optimizing Compilers and C/C++ run-time libraries

Availability
The S32K5 platform was demonstrated in the NXP booth at embedded world, March 11-13, 2025, and is available to early customers today, running and integrated with the Synopsys Virtualizer™ S32K5 VDK virtual model simulator.

About Green Hills Software

Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software is the worldwide leader in embedded safety and security. In 2008, the Green Hills INTEGRITY-178 RTOS was the first and only operating system to be certified by NIAP (National Information Assurance Partnership comprised of NSA & NIST) to EAL 6+, 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 at https://www.ghs.com.

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