Green Hills Software's INTEGRITY RTOS flies in F-16 fighter jet

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Jan 6, 2003

Green Hills Software Inc. has announced that Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. (LM Aero) has selected the INTEGRITY real-time operating system (RTOS) for use in the F-16 fighter jet's on-board Color Display Processor (CDP).

The CDP generates real-time video for cockpit displays, allowing pilots to monitor aircraft situation, engine performance and weapon system functionality while in flight.

The F-16 uses special external sensors to gather data about aircraft systems, including engine performance and weapons system functionality. This data is sent to the CDP, which generates real-time video for the F-16's display. The CDP also provides real-time video for radar, night vision and a map display, which enables pilots to see where they are flying. Pilots can zoom in, crop and even rotate specific segments of this display if they choose.

LM Aero is also using Green Hills Software's MULTI Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to develop application software for the CDP. The software runs on a Motorola PowerPC PPC7400 processor under the INTEGRITY RTOS.

"We need an ultra-reliable RTOS for the CDP," said Darrell Kindley, F-16 block 60 core processors and displays team lead at LM Aero. "In particular, we need a memory-protected, partitioned RTOS that enables us to isolate different parts of the application from others, so that errors in one part of the application will not affect other parts of the CDP. INTEGRITY's built-in memory protection, together with its hard real-time response and guaranteed resource availability, made it a perfect fit for this safety-critical application."

"Green Hills has a long history providing high-reliability RTOSes for military and aerospace applications," said John Carbone, vice president of marketing for Green Hills Software Inc. "INTEGRITY's secure partitioning and hard real-time characteristics make it ideal for developing and deploying embedded software used in mission-critical applications like the F-16."

INTEGRITY is a secure, fast, deterministic, real-time operating system optimized for embedded applications that place a premium on safety, reliability, real-time performance and testability. Utilizing a processor's memory management (MMU) facilities, INTEGRITY builds a firewall between the kernel and user tasks that prevents errant or malicious code from corrupting other user tasks or the kernel. INTEGRITY also delivers maximum responsiveness and determinism by running with interrupts continuously enabled and guaranteeing access to the CPU and memory for critical tasks.

INTEGRITY is tightly integrated with the MULTI IDE, which, together with Green Hills Software's family of C/C /EC optimizing compilers, automates all aspects of embedded PowerPC software development. MULTI features an INTEGRITY-aware source-level debugger, graphical program builder, run-time error checker, version control system and performance profiler. MULTI also features an INTEGRITY simulator (ISIM), which enables programmers to develop and test their code on a PC or workstation without the need for target hardware; and a real-time EventAnalyzer, which enables users to view system and user events in a graphical display.