News & Press

Santa Barbara, CA. March 5, 2002 -- Green Hills Software today announced that Goodrich Corporation selected Green Hills' INTEGRITY®-178B real-time operating system (RTOS) for use in its sophisticated EMC-100 Full Authority Digital Engine Control (FADEC) system. Goodrich will use INTEGRITY-178B to achieve DO-178B certification, including Level A, the highest safety level defined by the RTCA (Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics) for software used in airborne systems.

The EMC-100 is a sophisticated engine control system used in a variety of military and commercial aerospace applications, including helicopter engine controls. The EMC-100 consists of two parts, a controller box or ECU that determines how much power a turbo-shaft engine produces, and a hydromechanical metering system that handles fuel delivery to the engine.

INTEGRITY-178B runs on a PowerPC processor within the ECU, hosting embedded software that Goodrich developed using Green Hills Software's MULTI® Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This software, together with INTEGRITY-178B, controls the engine by setting the metering system to deliver the proper amount of fuel to the aircraft's turbo-shaft engines, thereby providing optimum engine and rotor speed control. Goodrich plans to use INTEGRITY-178B, along with Green Hills' GMART Ada run-time environment, to achieve additional DO-178B certification (levels A through E) within other partitions in the near future.

"We looked at VxWorks, Enea OSE, and our own proprietary RTOS, but INTEGRITY-178B was the only one that provided a secure ARINC-653-compliant partition scheduler, deterministic response and the only commercial royalty-free RTOS that allows us to achieve the DO-178B, Level A certification that we need," said Lou Pannullo, Director Electronics at Pump & Engine Control Systems, Goodrich Corporation. "In addition, INTEGRITY's superior partitioning enables us to add new functionality at Level A or lower levels without having to disrupt and recertify the entire engine control system."

"Green Hills has a proven track record providing real-time operating systems and development tools to the military and aerospace industry," said John Carbone, vice president of marketing for Green Hills Software. "INTEGRITY-178B's secure, memory protected architecture, fast deterministic response, and DO-178B safety credentials make it the premiere RTOS for safety-critical applications. We look forward to seeing INTEGRITY-178B deployed in Goodrich's sophisticated FADEC engine control systems and working with Goodrich to achieve the full complement of DO-178B certification levels."

INTEGRITY-178B is an ARINC-653-compliant subset of the INTEGRITY® real-time operating system, optimized for safety-critical applications containing multiple programs with different safety levels, all executing on a single processor. INTEGRITY-178B utilizes a number of hardware and software mechanisms in order to implement a securely partitioned architecture that ensures time/space protection and prevents errant and malicious tasks from corrupting user data, the kernel, interprocess communications, device drivers and other user tasks. INTEGRITY-178B also enhances reliability and security by guaranteeing deterministic access to both the CPU and memory for critical tasks.

INTEGRITY-178B is available with a SPARK-compliant, minimal Ada run-time system known as GMART (Green Hills Minimal Ada Run Time) or with a Ravanscar-compliant Ada run-time system known as GSTART (Green Hills Safe-Tasking Ada Run Time). Operating in a secure partition under INTEGRITY-178B, GMART is optimized for safety-critical, single-threaded applications, while GSTART is optimized for safety-critical applications that require Ada tasking support. INTEGRITY-178B comes with a complete DO-178B certification package, including detailed documentation of kernel calls to the source line, and complete coverage analysis data for the kernel.

INTEGRITY-178B is tightly integrated with the AdaMULTI® IDE, which, together with Green Hills Software's family of C/C++ and Ada 95 optimizing compilers, automates all aspects of embedded PowerPC software development. AdaMULTI features an INTEGRITY-aware source-level debugger, graphical program builder, run-time error checker, version control system, and performance profiler. AdaMULTI also features an INTEGRITY-178B simulator (ISIM) that enables programmers to develop and test their code on a PC or workstation without the need for target hardware.

The heart of AdaMULTI is its source-level debugger, which enables programmers to simultaneously debug multiple INTEGRITY-178B tasks across multiple address spaces, whether those tasks reside on a single processor, or are distributed across multiple processors. Through AdaMULTI, programmers can set process-specific and address-space-wide breakpoints, and monitor/record I/O and interprocess communications. They can also perform execution profiling at the process, address space, or system level to precisely pinpoint performance bottlenecks.

INTEGRITY-178B's graphical Resource Analyzer enhances the debug process by increasing visibility into applications and the kernel as they execute on the target system. The Resource Analyzer displays CPU execution at the task and address space level, stack usage for tasks, and memory use for address spaces. INTEGRITY-178B's real-time EventAnalyzer™ further enhances real-time visibility by enabling programmers to log and monitor system and application events in real time without disrupting program execution. Operating like a high-level logic analyzer, the EventAnalyzer displays all INTEGRITY-178B context switches, API calls, and interrupts in a time-relative manner using intuitive ICONs.

More on DO-178B

Developed by the non-profit Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA), DO-178B is an internationally recognized standard required for certifying software used in airborne systems and equipment. DO-178B defines five software levels (A through E), with Level A (applicable to the most critical aircraft equipment) requiring the greatest level of effort to show compliance to DO-178B.

More on Green Hills Software

Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software Inc. is the technology leader for real-time operating systems and software development tools for 32- and 64-bit embedded systems. Green Hills Software's royalty-free INTEGRITY®, INTEGRITY®-178B and ThreadX® real-time operating systems, fully integrated with its market leading compilers and MULTI®/AdaMULTI® Integrated Development Environment, provide a total development and run-time solution that addresses both deeply embedded and maximum reliability applications.

Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, with European headquarters in the United Kingdom. For more information on Green Hills Software products, call 805-965-6044, email sales@ghs.com or visit us on the web at www.ghs.com.

Green Hills Software, the Green Hills logo, and MULTI are registered trademarks, and INTEGRITY and the Green Hills Probe are trademarks of Green Hills Software Inc.
 
All other trademarks (registered or otherwise) are the property of their respective companies.