Green Hills Software And Embedded Planet Team Up To Deliver Complete Powerpc Solutions For Com Apps

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Dec 3, 2001

Green Hills Software and Embedded Planet recently announced the availability of complete PowerPC embedded solutions combining Embedded Planet's PowerPC based single-board computers with Green Hills' MULTI Integrated Development Environment and INTEGRITY real-time operating system.

This bundled solution, now available directly from Green Hills Software, provides a compact, low-cost, high-availability platform that makes it easy to develop and deploy PowerPC applications for a broad range of networking and communications equipment.

Embedded Planet offers a full line of small form factor PC/104, EBX, and credit-card-sized single-board computers based on Motorola's PowerQUICC 8xx and PowerQUICC II 82xx processors, and IBM Microelectronics' PowerPC 405GP processors. The MULTI IDE and INTEGRITY RTOS are available for Embedded Planet's single-board computers, which are equipped with up to 128 Mbytes of DRAM, 32 Mbytes of flash memory, 512 Kbytes of non-volatile memory, Ethernet and serial interfaces. The EP8260 features both processor and local SDRAM, provides direct access to the PowerQUICC II 8260 processor and supports simultaneous UTOPIA and Fast Ethernet access. Embedded Planet's CPU boards also feature integrated firmware and utilities (PlanetCore) for diagnostics, burning flash, and booting the INTEGRITY RTOS, and are also available with a variety of video and multimedia I/O options.

The MULTI 2000 IDE, together with Green Hills' family of optimizing C, C , and EC compilers, automates all aspects of software development for the PowerPC processor. Available for Windows, Linux, Solaris and Unix host platforms, the MULTI IDE features a window-oriented editor, source-level debugger, graphical program builder, run-time error checker, version control system, performance profiler, and real-time RTOS EventAnalyzer. MULTI also features an instruction set simulator that allows programmers to develop and test their PowerPC code on a PC or workstation.

The INTEGRITY RTOS, tightly integrated with MULTI, is a small, scalable, memory-protected, royalty-free RTOS. Leveraging the hardware memory protection facilities of the PowerPC's Memory Management Unit (MMU), INTEGRITY maximizes security and reliability by building a "firewall" between the kernel and user tasks. This firewall prevents errant or malicious tasks from corrupting user data, the kernel, interprocess communications, device drivers, and other user tasks. In addition, INTEGRITY guarantees the availability of system resources like the CPU and memory, making it far more responsive and predictable than conventional embedded operating systems.

"The combination of Green Hills' MULTI IDE and INTEGRITY RTOS with Embedded Planet's PowerPC hardware will provide engineers an affordable, full featured development solution for the networking and embedded markets," said John Carbone, vice president of marketing at Green Hills Software. "A number of our customers have expressed interest in the PowerQUICC platform, particularly the 8260. This bundled solution enables engineers to start writing PowerQUICC application code with proven, integrated hardware and software right out of the box."

Mark Lowdermilk, Embedded Planet CEO, commented, "Embedded Planet is excited to work with Green Hills to offer bundled PowerPC systems. These bundled solutions make it much easier for hardware and software engineering teams to work closely together, enabling OEMs to move quickly through the design, development, and deployment stages. There are real cost and time savings to this integration, especially in the networking marketplace."

Embedded Planet's single-board computers can be purchased directly from Green Hills, starting at $495. MULTI 2000 for Linux and Windows costs $5,900, MULTI 2000 for HP-UX and Solaris costs $9,900 (U.S.). All versions are immediately available.