Green Hills Software Optimizes Device Software Development for Eclipse Users; MULTI Development Environment and Green Hills C/C++ Compilers Integrated with Eclipse 3.1 and New CDT 3.0

Business Wire, Sept 12, 2005

BOSTON -- Green Hills Software, Inc., the technology leader in real-time operating systems (RTOS) and Device Software Optimization (DSO), announced today that users of the Eclipse framework and its C/C Development Tools (CDT) can now take advantage of the industry-leading DSO capabilities of the company's MULTI development environment and C/C compilers.

Green Hills Software's tools have been integrated with the standard version of the latest Eclipse 3.1 and CDT 3.0 distributions from eclipse.org. This integration is significantly more seamless to end-users than that taken by other DSO vendors such as Wind River Systems, who have modified Eclipse and thus force their customers to acquire and use their proprietary Eclipse derivative. Instead, with Green Hills Software's solution, developers can use their existing Eclipse and CDT implementations; all extensions required for device software development are handled by the MULTI environment.

"Green Hills Software lets developers take advantage of the best of both the Eclipse and device software optimization worlds," commented Dan O'Dowd, founder and chief executive officer of Green Hills Software. "MULTI provides the best-in-class tools for device software optimization. Eclipse is gaining in popularity as a framework for enterprise-wide tools integration. By adding our device software capabilities to the IT-centric Eclipse, we enable developers to leverage the strengths of each environment."

"Our Eclipse customers adopted it because they want to deploy a standard, vendor-independent tools framework across their enterprise," added David Kleidermacher, vice president of engineering at Green Hills Software. "They don't want to be locked-in to a single vendor's customized version of Eclipse or, worse, to have to deploy multiple vendor-proprietary Eclipse implementations. That would put them right back to where they were before Eclipse. This is why Green Hills Software's tools work out-of-the-box with customers' existing Eclipse environments."

In the spirit of the open source Eclipse community, Green Hills Software is making the source code to its Eclipse plug-ins available to its MULTI and compiler customers. This will allow them to customize it for their environments.

Green Hills C/C Compilers and CDT Integration

Green Hills C/C compilers plug in seamlessly to the Eclipse CDT, providing device software developers with the same level of integration as the default GNU compilers and a number of significant advantages:

--Much faster code. Microprocessor vendors -- including Analog Devices, Freescale, IBM and NEC -- have selected Green Hills compilers more than three times as often as GNU in order to achieve the highest possible performance on benchmarks that were certified and published by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC).

--Much smaller code. The Green Hills compiler can reduce the ROM required by the Linux kernel by up to 35% compared to GNU.

--Broader dialect support. The Green Hills compilers support all major C and C language dialects, include ANSI/ISO, Annotated Reference Manual (ARM), Kernighan and Ritchie (K&R), Embedded C (EC ) and Motor Industry Software Reliability Association (MISRA) and GNU.

Specific features of the Green Hills compiler integration with the Eclipse CDT include:

--Integration with the new project wizard to automate starting a new project using the Eclipse CDT's "managed make."

--Graphical user interface to set Green Hills compiler options.

--Parsing of error and warning messages so that their source is automatically identified in the Eclipse editor.

MULTI Enhancements to Eclipse

MULTI tools can also be launched from within the Eclipse interface, including the MULTI source-level debugger and instruction set simulators. The standard Eclipse console can be used to view the output from applications running on a simulator.

MULTI provides significant advantages over the CDT debugger and over solutions that require a modified version of Eclipse:

--MULTI can be plugged into users' existing Eclipse environment. No custom Eclipse distribution or Eclipse modifications are required.

--MULTI seamlessly debugs applications distributed over multiple heterogeneous processors, operating systems, processes and threads. Multiple synchronized debugger windows can be viewed concurrently, significantly easing the debugging of inter-task interactions.

--MULTI includes best-in-class capabilities such as sophisticated run-time error checking, advanced performance profiling and comprehensive code coverage analysis.

MULTI tools are also more broadly available than the CDT debugger:

--MULTI supports 25 different 32- and 64-bit target processor families, including ARC, ARM, Blackfin, ColdFire, M32R, MIPS, Pentium/x86, PowerPC, StrongARM, SuperH, V800 and XScale.

--MULTI supports the most popular target operating systems, including Green Hills Software's INTEGRITY and velOSity; Express Logic's ThreadX, which is available from and supported by Green Hills Software; VxWorks; OSE; Linux; Windows; Solaris; in-house operating systems; and systems with no operating system.