SAN ANTONIO, TX — June 22, 2011 — FREESCALE TECHNOLOGY FORUM — Green Hills Software, the largest independent vendor of embedded software solutions, today announced important enhancements to its Automotive Platform. These include a powerful new processor trace probe update, MULTI® compiler performance and footprint optimizations, along with native support for the highly reliable and secure Green Hills INTEGRITY® real-time operating system targeting Freescale Semiconductor’s Qorivva™ family of automotive microcontrollers.
Today’s automotive electronic control units (ECUs) are powered by incredibly sophisticated microcontrollers with numerous specialized processing elements that must be carefully optimized together to achieve the aggressive performance and reliability design goals set in place by the automotive OEMs and their Tier 1 suppliers. Developers require a correspondingly powerful set of development tools with highly reliable target software solutions to address these challenges.
“Qorivva microcontrollers continue to deliver incredible automotive performance across a wide range of configurations,” said Ray Cornyn, director of Freescale’s automotive MCU business. “The optimized Green Hills development solutions and target software enable our customers to maximize the full capabilities of the Qorivva microcontrollers.”
“In working closely with Freescale Semiconductor, Green Hills has been continually evolving its Automotive Platform to address the growing demands of its mutual customers,” commented Dan Mender, vice president of business development. “Through our collaboration, we are able to bring unprecedented reliability, performance, and debug capabilities to Freescale’s lineup of Qorivva automotive microcontrollers.”
Non-intrusive Graphical Trace Collection and Debug
The Green Hills SuperTrace™ Probe v3 recently received an upgrade that expands its support for the broad range of Qorivva microcontrollers by delivering 4GB of trace memory collection capability to this processor family with an option to upgrade to up to 8GB of memory. A new trace adapter supporting 5-volt interfaces has also been developed and is now available for the Qorivva family. With 4GB of non-intrusive trace memory collected through the Nexus Class 3 interface, SuperTrace Probe v3 can record long application execution histories, making it easier than ever to catch bugs that were previously difficult to find. Coupled with the Green Hills advanced TimeMachine™ back-in-time debugger, users are able to observe significant events, such as a boot from reset of an RTOS and task startup. Bugs which were previously hard to trace are now easy to find.
Performance
Green Hills Software’s optimizing compilers for Power Architecture® were used by Freescale Semiconductor for certified, published Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium® (EEMBC) Automark™ scores for their 32-bit Qorivva MPC5566, MPC5607B, MPC5644A, and MPC5674F microcontrollers. The results for the MPC5674F are the highest Automark scores ever achieved on an automotive microcontroller. The Green Hills compilers have been chosen for EEMBC published benchmark scores more than any other compiler and have attained the highest published scores in every EEMBC benchmark category.
Optimizations
The Green Hills Software tools employ thousands of machine independent and machine dependent optimizations, including advanced techniques such as VLE instruction packing, link-time automatic small data area optimization and code factoring and inter-procedural optimizations. The result is technology that generates the fastest and smallest code for Power Architecture, as well as many other microprocessors.
Reliability and Availability
The Green Hills Software tools and operating systems are used to build software running the most reliability-critical systems, including aircraft engines, automotive electronics, medical devices, industrial controllers, and high availability telecommunications equipment. Companies like Ford, Boeing, and Hewlett Packard base the reliability of their products on the proven robustness of Green Hills Software’s technology. In addition to its award-winning MULTI development suite and feature-leading trace probe, Green Hills has also ported its INTEGRITY real-time operating system to the MPC5688G Qorivva microcontroller. The RTOS and applications can be built with variable length encoding (VLE) by Green Hills optimizing compilers, enabling on average a 20% code size reduction. Full VLE support for debugging has been added to MULTI to support run-mode, stop-mode, and OS-aware debugging. The INTEGRITY board support package (BSP) includes support for serial, I2C, SPI, and CAN.
The Green Hills Software Automotive Platform is available today for Freescale Semiconductor’s 32-bit Qorivva microcontrollers.
About the Freescale Qorivva MCUs
With more than 200 million 32-bit Power Architecture MCUs shipped to date, Freescale is a proven, trusted supplier of solutions for the automotive electronics market. Freescale Qorivva MCUs are built on Power Architecture cores configured to meet the rigorous demands of the automotive environment. The Qorivva MCU families address key challenges for the automotive market, including the need for increased performance, new safety requirements and enhanced security features. Qorivva MCUs feature leading-edge integration and performance capabilities, including configurable peripheral sets such as flexible timers and motor control systems. Digital signal processing capabilities provide additional functionality. With these features, Qorivva MCUs provide the freedom to architect the ideal solution for a particular application.
About Green Hills Software
Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software is the largest independent vendor of embedded development solutions. In 2008, the Green Hills INTEGRITY-178B RTOS was the first and only operating system to be certified by NIAP (National Information Assurance Partnership comprised of NSA & NIST) to EAL6+, High Robustness, the highest level of security ever achieved for any software product. Our open architecture integrated development solutions address deeply embedded, absolute security and high-reliability applications for the military/avionics, medical, industrial, automotive, networking, consumer and other markets that demand industry-certified solutions. Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, with European headquarters in the United Kingdom. Visit Green Hills Software at www.ghs.com.
