Green Hills Software adds support for the heterogeneous NXP i.MX 8
Green Hills Software has announced that the Integrity-178 Time-Variant Unified Multiprocessing (tuMP) real time operating system (RTOS) now supports heterogeneous multi-core operation on NXP Semiconductor’s i.MX 8 applications processors across Arm Cortex-A72 and Cortex-A53 cores.
The RTOS can be used for airborne safety-critical and security-critical systems. A system architect can use the bound multi-processing (BMP) and symmetric multi-processing (SMP) capabilities to assign an application to a particular core or a multi-threaded application to execute across multiple cores, yet minimise power consumption, explained Green Hills.
Features in the NXP i.MX 8 applications processors that make them particularly suitable for avionics, airborne mission computers and cockpit displays, include SWaP-optimised heterogeneous processing, quad-display functionality, low soft-error rate, and product supply longevity. The i.MX 8QuadMax has four Cortex-A53 cores and two Cortex-A72 cores and optimises power consumption by matching the performance requirements of each application task to the performance capacities of the different cores. For cockpit displays and other graphics applications, the processor can drive up to four 1080p screens with independent content.
The i.MX 8 processors are based on a 28nm FDSOI manufacturing process which has inherently high immunity to alpha particle flux and enables high mean time between failure (MTBF).
Integrity-178 tuMP includes a capable multi-core scheduler and support for bandwidth allocation and management of shared processor resource access. The supported bandwidth management technique emulates a high-rate hardware-based approach to ensure continuous allocation enforcement. According to Green Hills, these features lower integration and certification risks and also enable integrators to gain the maximum performance advantages of multi-core processors.
The Integrity-178 tuMP safety- and security-critical RTOS is designed to simultaneously meet DO-178B/C design assurance level (DAL) A and the separation kernel protection profile (SKPP) as defined by the NSA. Integrity-178 tuMP is a multi-core RTOS with support for any mixture of asymmetric multi-processing (AMP), SMP and BMP.
It includes support for running a multi-threaded DO-178C DAL A partition across multiple processor cores in SMP or BMP configurations as required in ARINC 653 Part 1, Supplements 4 and 5.
Integrity-178 tuMP was the first RTOS to be certified to the FACE Technical Standard, edition 3.0 and remains the only one conformant for all three avionics processor architectures Arm, Intel®, and Power Architecture, noted Green Hills.
Green Hills Software was founded in 1982. It specialises in embedded safety and security. In 2008, the Green Hills Integrity-178 RTOS was certified by NIAP (National Information Assurance Partnership comprised of NSA & NIST) to EAL 6+, High Robustness, the highest level of security ever achieved for any software product.
The company’s open architecture integrated development solutions address deeply embedded, absolute security and high-reliability applications for markets that demand industry-certified solutions, for example the military, avionics, medical, industrial, automotive, networking and consumer markets.
Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, USA, with European headquarters in the UK.
