Green Hills Software Announces INTEGRITY Real-Time Operating System For MIPS32 Cores; INTEGRITY Now Available For MIPS-based Systems.

Business Editors & High-Tech Writers

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 10, 2001

Green Hills Software today announced the availability of its INTEGRITY(TM) real-time operating system (RTOS) for the MIPS32 architecture and compatible processor cores (MIPS32(TM) 4Kc(TM), 4Km(TM), and 4Kp(TM)).

INTEGRITY gives designers of MIPS32-based defense, telecom and consumer systems a secure, ultra-reliable, royalty-free target environment for deploying their applications.

"INTEGRITY's advanced technology and fast, deterministic response make it the most reliable real-time multitasking solution on the market today, and the only royalty-free memory-protected commercial RTOS," said John Carbone, vice president of marketing at Green Hills. "Now, MIPS32 designers who already enjoy the productivity and code optimization benefits of our MULTI(R) Integrated Development Environment (IDE) can deploy their MIPS32 applications on the most reliable RTOS ... without paying royalties."

"Many of our telecom, datacom and consumer product customers demand high reliability from their operating systems," said Victor Peng, vice president of engineering for MIPS Technologies Inc. "INTEGRITY offers our customers a solution that takes advantage of the performance and power-saving features of the MIPS32 architecture while maximizing security, reliability and availability in their target system."

The MIPS32 4Kc, 4Km, and 4Kp cores are high-performance, synthesizable, 32-bit RISC processor cores for system-on-a-chip applications such as battery-operated handheld devices, cable modems, line cards, and set-top boxes. Fully compatible with the MIPS32 architecture, the 4K family of cores run existing R3000 and R4000 user-level code.

INTEGRITY is a scalable, ROMable, memory-protected, royalty-free real-time operating system. Leveraging the hardware memory protection facilities of the MIPS32 Memory Management Unit (MMU), INTEGRITY maximizes security and reliability by building a "firewall" between the kernel and user tasks, preventing 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 in both the time and space domain, making it far more advanced in this area than other operating systems that employ simple memory protection schemes.

INTEGRITY utilizes a number of techniques to enhance determinism and reduce response time. First, it employs a pre-emptive, real-time, priority-based multitasking scheduler that enables programmers to guarantee resource (CPU and memory) availability for critical tasks. Second, the INTEGRITY kernel never masks or blocks interrupts. Finally, it uses kernel services with short, bounded computation times, and avoids instructions for long-latency operations such as division and string manipulation, which can block interrupts in some systems.

INTEGRITY features comprehensive networking and embedded Internet support. INTEGRITY supports a TCP/IP stack, Web server, Web browser, networking protocols (UDP, DHCP, FTP, and Telnet), routing protocols (NATrouter and RIP) and SNMP management software, all of which are optimized for embedded applications. INTEGRITY also supports Trillium's telecom protocols, including SS7, ATM, Broadband ISDN, Frame Relay/ATM, MPLS, H.323 Control (VoIP), TCP/UDP Convergence, ASN.1 Encoder/Decoder -- PER, RTC/RTPC, SIP, SCTP, SS7 MTP Level 3 user adaptation layer, GPRS, 3G, V5 and GR-303, ISDN, Q.930/Q.931, and X.25/X.75.

INTEGRITY is tightly integrated with the MULTI and AdaMULTI(R) 2000 IDE. Together with Green Hills' family of optimizing C, C++, EC++, and Ada95 compilers, MULTI automates all aspects of embedded software development for MIPS32 cores, including editing, source-level debugging, program building, run-time error checking, version control and code/performance optimization. MULTI also features ISIM, an RTOS simulator that enables programmers to develop and test their code on a PC or workstation without the need for target hardware.

The MULTI debugger enables programmers to simultaneously debug multiple INTEGRITY tasks across multiple address spaces, whether those processes reside on a single processor, or are distributed across multiple processors. MULTI automatically activates a new debugger window when a process is created, and provides a process roster window for tracking process and choosing which process to debug. Through MULTI, programmers can set process-specific and address-space-wide breakpoints, and monitor/record I/O and interprocess communications. They can also perform execution profiling at the process, address space, or system level to precisely pinpoint performance bottlenecks.

INTEGRITY is available immediately for MIPS32 cores and works out of the box with a variety of popular MIPS-based evaluation boards, including Galileo's EV64120, MIPS' Atlas and Malta boards, and Toshiba's JMR3927. Green Hills also offers a porting kit and turnkey porting services for designers who want to port INTEGRITY to other platforms.

Development licenses for the INTEGRITY RTOS, including a board support package, start at $ 15,000 per product. Run-time licenses for INTEGRITY on the target system are free.

More on Green Hills Software Inc.

Incorporated in 1982, Green Hills Software Inc., is a leading supplier of royalty-free real-time operating systems and software development tools for 32- and 64-bit embedded systems. Green Hills' royalty-free ThreadX(R) and INTEGRITY(TM) real-time operating systems, fully integrated with its market leading compilers and MULTI(R) (IDE), provide a total development and run-time solution that addresses both deeply embedded and high-reliability applications. Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, Calif., with international headquarters in the United Kingdom. For more information on Green Hills Software products, call 805/965-6044 or email inquiries to [e-mail]. Additional information is available on the Internet at http://www.ghs.com.

Green Hills Software and MULTI are registered trademarks and INTEGRITY is a trademark of Green Hills Software Inc. MIPS(R) is a registered trademark in the United States and one or more other countries, and MIPS32(TM), 4KE(TM) and MIPS-based(TM) are trademarks of MIPS Technologies Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies.