Commercial Airliner Safety Improves with New Green Hills INTEGRITY-178B Based T2CAS System

Business Wire, April 7, 2003

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 7, 2003

INTEGRITY-178B is the only commercial RTOS certified by the

FAA to provide robust partitioning for multiple DO-178B

criticality levels on a single processor

Green Hills Software Inc., the world's second largest hard real-time operating systems company, today announced that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has completed another successful DO-178B certification for INTEGRITY-178B real-time operating system (RTOS). Aviation Communication and Surveillance System (ACSS), an L-3 Communications and Thales company, is using INTEGRITY-178B in their new Traffic and Terrain Collision Avoidance System (T2CAS) that recently received FAA certification.

This successful FAA certification included the review and verification of INTEGRITY-178B's ARINC-653 compliant partition scheduler that the ACSS T2CAS uses to provide space and temporal protection across multiple partitions. The ACSS T2CAS also relies on additional INTEGRITY-178B partitioning features in order to run multiple applications in separate partitions that operate at different levels of criticality.

"We selected INTEGRITY-178B because we required a commercially supported real-time operating system that met our T2CAS system requirement for operating multiple programs at different FAA criticality levels on a single PowerPC," said Jim Redmond, engineering manager of ACSS. "INTEGRITY-178B has enabled us to complete this project and secure FAA certification faster than if we had used other approaches we considered."

INTEGRITY-178B is the first commercial RTOS that provides robust partitioning and that has been designed into a flight-critical system certified by the FAA. Typically, avionics manufacturers configure multiple processors, each one assigned to run an application at a particular safety level and certified to that level. Using INTEGRITY-178B, only a single processor is required to support multiple levels of criticality with guarantees that no application can adversely affect the functionality or performance of another application. This offers avionics manufacturers a significant cost reduction and simplifies system integration and test, increasing overall system reliability.

Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) enable all commercial and many private aircraft to safely avoid other aircraft by sensing the other aircraft's transponder signals. T2CAS is an avionics system that combines aircraft performance-based Terrain Awareness Warning System (TAWS) capability into the TCAS 2000 line-replaceable unit (LRU). T2CAS is also backward compatible for operators using ACSS first-generation TCAS II. T2CAS provides greater collision-avoidance capabilities than previously available in a single system, reducing pilot workload and making air travel safer in all-weather conditions. The new system introduces a higher level of safety to all areas of aviation by increasing pilot awareness to potential terrain hazards and basing its alerts and avoidance maneuvers on an aircraft's actual ability to climb at a given moment -- not based on predetermined computations. The growing list of customers who have selected T2CAS includes Aero California, Aeromexico, FedEx, Northwest Airlines, Mesaba Airlines, the U.S. Customs Service and Virgin Express, as well as others to be announced shortly.

"ACSS, like many other safety-critical system designers have selected INTEGRITY-178B for their commercial avionics products," said Patrick Huyck, systems certification manager for Green Hills Software. "They see that INTEGRITY-178B uniquely satisfies their needs for an operating system with real-time performance, DO-178B Level A life-cycle data, robust partitioning and is supported by a reliable commercial RTOS supplier." The ACSS Web site can be found at www.l-3com.com/acss/home.> Availability

INTEGRITY-178B is available now with off-the-shelf DO-178B, Level A Certification Packages, the robust MULTI and AdaMULTI development environment, and Green Hills Software's EEMBC (the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium)-leading PowerPC compiler family. INTEGRITY also supports MIPS, ARM, XScale, and x86/Pentium processors.

About 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. The royalty-free INTEGRITY RTOS, compilers, MULTI and AdaMULTI Integrated Development Environments and Green Hills Probe offer a complete development solution that addresses both deeply embedded and maximum reliability applications. Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, with European headquarters in the United Kingdom. For more information, please refer to the GHS Web site at www.ghs.com.