Green Hills Software Announces DSO Solution for Xilinx Virtex-4 Platform FPGAs; Immediate Availability of Leading Hardware and Software Solution for Software Defined Radio

Business Wire, Jan 31, 2006

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- Green Hills Software, Inc., the leader in real-time operating systems (RTOS) and device software optimization (DSO), today announced the immediate availability of its entire DSO product line for Xilinx Virtex(TM)-4 Platform FPGAs, including the INTEGRITY real-time operating system (RTOS), PowerPC compilers, TimeMachine debugger, MULTI integrated development environment (IDE), Green Hills probe, and SuperTrace probe. While each product is a leader in its space, together they form an optimized and highly integrated DSO solution that enables Virtex-4 system developers to create the highest performing and most reliable product in the least amount of time and at the lowest cost for solutions in the networking, medical, automotive, avionics, defense, and industrial control markets.

"Working with industry leaders such as Green Hills is a key component of our strategy and product roadmap for delivering reliable, high performance programmable development platforms to the defense systems and SDR market," commented Mark Jensen, Senior Manager, Embedded Ecosystem Strategic Marketing, Xilinx, Inc. "The combination of Green Hills Software's tools and operating systems with Xilinx platform FPGAs provides a truly compelling device software and hardware optimization solution across a wide variety of applications and industries."

Advanced Hardware/Software Solution for Software Defined Radio

Xilinx and Green Hills have collaborated to develop an integrated hardware and software solution for Software Defined Radio (SDR). This solution integrates the Green Hills Software Platform for Software Defined Radio, including the tools and embedded software required to develop and deploy Software Communications Architecture (SCA)-compliant SDR systems, with the Virtex-II or Virtex-4 FPGAs.

The INTEGRITY RTOS provides POSIX conformant interfaces required by the SCA, bullet-proof reliability, and dynamic loading of components required to realize a truly software-configurable radio. The Xilinx platform FPGA provides best-in-class power efficiency, incorporating digital signal processing (DSP) as well as embedded PowerPC(TM) general-purpose processing, which results in reduced component count and footprint over legacy radio designs. Furthermore, Xilinx FPGAs enable IP blocks to be field upgraded, providing maximum waveform coverage with minimum hardware resources.

"The promise of SDR to provide interoperability amongst military, civil, and multinational concerns, improving safety and security while reducing time to market and cost for radio developers is extremely exciting," commented David Kleidermacher, vice president of engineering at Green Hills Software. "However, these SDR architectures place incredible performance, reliability, and scalability demands on the software and hardware infrastructure. The Green Hills Platform for Software Defined Radio and the Xilinx platform FPGAs meet these demands while minimizing cost, weight, power, and space."

INTEGRITY Integration with Xilinx EDK

INTEGRITY represents the most advanced RTOS technology on the market today, achieving unprecedented levels of reliability, availability, and serviceability for applications in telecommunications, aviation, defense, networking, automotive, consumer, medical, and other industries. INTEGRITY has been integrated with the Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK), enabling a complete INTEGRITY Board Support Package (BSP) to be configured and automatically generated from the Xilinx graphical environment, making it extremely easy to develop and deploy INTEGRITY-based applications. Target development boards include the Xilinx ML403 and Avnet FX. Peripheral support includes interrupt controllers, Ethernet, serial/UART, and DDR RAM.

TimeMachine

The MULTI(R) TimeMachine(TM) suite offers a wide variety of trace analysis tools that enable embedded software developers to find and fix bugs faster, optimize with ease, and test with confidence. TimeMachine provides unprecedented visibility into the complex interactions in software that can result in bugs, performance problems, and testing nightmares. Trace data is collected off of the PowerPC core by the Green Hills Software SuperTrace probe and then uploaded to the host computer for analysis within TimeMachine. By presenting this information in easy-to-understand displays, TimeMachine enables developers to quickly navigate through trace data and produce better code in less time.

PowerPC Compilers

For more than a decade, Green Hills Software's compilers have led the world in performance and footprint of generated PowerPC code. The Xilinx platform FPGAs incorporate the IBM PowerPC 405 core. IBM has chosen the Green Hills compilers to publish certified processor performance scores for the PowerPC 405 on the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) suite. In addition, the Green Hills Software compiler has built the Linux kernel for the PowerPC 405, generating 30% smaller code than the bundled GCC compiler. Smaller footprint and faster code translate directly into lower production cost and higher quality for embedded products.