Green Hills Software teams with Arm for critical embedded systems
Working prototypes for the Arm Cortex-A78AE core have been developed by Green Hills Software. The prototypes establish a clear path for early adopters of the core for use in high-performance critical electronic systems, says the company.
Green Hills’ Integrity real time operating system (RTOS) and C/C++ development tools provide the certified safe and secure software foundation for SoC manufacturers and end-customers to access the Cortex-A78AE core for complex and mission-critical functions in automated driving and critical industrial systems.
The amount of software controlling critical systems continues to rise from cars to utility grids and aircraft and is being consolidated from smaller processors to more centralised high performance units. Arm Cortex-A5x and Cortex-A7x-based SoCs with the Integrity RTOS and virtualisation are widely deployed in safety and security-critical systems. This combination supports systems that require even higher performance, more complex software, mixed criticality workloads, including open source software while simultaneously delivering high assurance for safety and security, says Green Hills.
The Cortex-A78AE is Arm’s safety-capable CPU, offering the ability to run different, complex workloads for autonomous applications such as mobile robotics and driverless transportation. The core delivers a 30 per cent performance uplift compared to its predecessor and supports features to achieve the relevant automotive and industrial functional safety standards, ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 for applications up to ASIL D/SIL 3. The Armv8-A architectural features are focused on safety, security and reliability including split-lock lock step, pointer authentication, enhanced virtualisation, system ready portability and planned software test libraries (STLs).
The Integrity software foundation runs and protects millions of critical systems today in cars, aircraft, trains, secure phones and surgical devices. Its separation kernel technology is certified at the highest levels of safety and security standards including automotive (ISO 26262 ASIL D), industrial (IEC 61508 SIL 3), railway (EN 50128 SIL 4) and airborne systems (DO-178C DAL A). The automotive cybersecurity ISO 21434 is also being adopted. Integrity secure virtualisation enables running multiple guest operating systems such as Linux in certified secure partitions. For development, the Multi debugger enables unified debugging and analysis across multiple cores on complex Cortex-A78AE-based SoCs and executes programs forwards or backwards in time.
“The future of autonomous machines requires a high-performance processor and the Arm Cortex-A78AE has been designed from the ground up for handling the most complex safety-critical applications,” said John Heinlein, vice president of automotive partnerships, automotive and IoT line of business at Arm. “Arm’s partnership with Green Hills Software to provide early availability to mature base software and development tools accelerates the journey to Arm-based automated driving and critical industrial systems,” he adds.
Prototypes of Green Hills products including Integrity, Multi and the Green Hills Probe, are available today on the Arm Neoverse N1 SDP board.
