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Product category: Design and Development Software
News Release from: Green Hills Software | Subject: Platform for Industrial Safety
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 06 January 2006

Platform gets to grips with
safety-critical design

The Green Hills Platform for Industrial Safety is a complete software development and deployment solution for safety-critical industrial devices.

The Green Hills Platform for Industrial Safety is a complete software development and deployment solution for safety-critical industrial devices The Platform for Industrial Safety includes: the new, royalty-free Integrity-61508 real-time operating system (RTOS), which is in the final stages of certification by TUV to IEC61508 at Safety Integrity Level 3 (SIL3); the Multi development environment, the most powerful and complete set of tools for optimising the reliability, performance, cost and time to market of device software; a full set of safety documentation, which is required for certification of the final device; and optional middleware, Integrity-61508 source code, certification evidence and services

Integrity-61508 is the first RTOS that provides complete support for multiple levels of IEC61508 functional safety running concurrently on a single microprocessor.

In addition, Integrity-61508 SIL3 certification will be available for a broad range of target microprocessors.

The Green Hills Platform for Industrial Safety delivers a number of significant benefits to developers of safety-critical industrial devices, including process controllers, programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and flame, gas and temperature sensors, including reduced hardware costs, physical footprint, power and heat dissipation requirements.

The Integrity-61508 RTOS enables the consolidation of traditionally distributed systems and software onto a single microprocessor.

In the past, manufacturers had to certify all software running on a processor to the most stringent safety level required by any component.

Consequently, "federated" distributed systems had to be deployed to physically separate software at different functional safety levels.

Although this approach minimised certification cost and risk, it increased the overall system cost and complexity.

In contrast, with the innovative secure partitioning capability of the Integrity-61508 RTOS, software - from non-safety-related through safety critical - can be partitioned on a single processor.

Each partition can then be certified at its appropriate Safety Integrity Level, eliminating the need for separate physical systems or to certify code beyond the required safety level.

Industrial device manufacturers can take advantage of an RTOS that is certified to a high functional safety level to minimise the quantity of software and documentation that they must develop for their end products' safety certifications.

"When people's safety is entrusted to computers, software reliability cannot be compromised", commented Dan O'Dowd, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Green Hills Software.

"Adequate safety assurance can only be established through formal certifications such as IEC61508 for industrial devices and RTCA/DO-178B for avionics".

"We were the first commercial supplier with a partitioned and certified DO-178B RTOS, and now we are introducing the first partitioned IEC61508 solution, enabling device manufacturers to achieve higher safety with lower costs and faster time to market".

"IEC61508 certification is an excellent means to demonstrate high software quality", commented Dr William M Goble, Principal Partner at exida.com, a safety consulting and training firm.

"The use of a certified operating system presents the opportunity for tremendous savings in development cost for products requiring IEC61508 certification".

"In addition, Green Hills Software has demonstrated that stringent safety requirements can be met while still supporting the rich feature set required by their customers".

"Safety related industrial applications once focused heavily on control processing, but over time have been challenged with incorporating serious signal and even elements of multimedia processing into their products".

"Development on multiple processors with complex software partitioning, though feasible, is not productive from the cost, time, or certification standpoint", commented Wayne Meyer, Product Marketing Manager at Analog Devices.

"The combination of Green Hills Software's now IEC61508 safety certified Integrity RTOS on a single MMU-protected SIMD Blackfin processor, which start at $5 for 400MHz, allows for development at a software-enabled scalable platform level".

"With a comprehensive range of ColdFire processors designed and developed specifically for industrial devices, Freescale understands the importance of software and tools to our customers", commented Jeff Bock, Global 16/32bit Consumer and Industrial Product Marketing Manager at Freescale Semiconductor.

"The Green Hills Platform for Industrial Safety enables our customers to standardise on a single technology base while taking full advantage of the spectrum of capabilities built into the ColdFire family, including hardware cryptography and MMU to help them build safe and secure industrial devices".

The Green Hills Platform for Industrial Safety will be available when certification is complete for ARM, Blackfin, ColdFire, MIPS, PowerPC, StrongArm, x86/Pentium and XScale processors.

Pricing for the Green Hills Platform for Industrial Safety begins at US $22,400 for a single-user enterprise licence; there are no run-time royalty fees for deployment.

Single-product, product-line and subscription licensing is also available. Request a free brochure from Green Hills Software ...

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