Green Hills Software and Objective Interface Systems Announce Breakthrough in Software Defined Radio Optimization

Green Hills Software and Objective Interface Systems Announce Breakthrough in Software-Defined Radio Optimization

Collaboration cuts memory requirements for SDR designs by 50%

SANTA BARBARA, CA and HERNDON, VAMarch 19, 2007—Green Hills Software, Inc., the technology leader in device software optimization (DSO) and real-time operating systems (RTOS), and Objective Interface Systems, Inc., the worldwide leader of high-performance, real-time and embedded communications middleware solutions, today announced that they have collaborated on an innovative technique that drastically reduces the memory footprint of the software used to build software-defined radios (SDRs). This reduction in resource usage translates into significant cost and footprint savings in radio production.

“While the promise of dynamic interoperability and reconfigurability enabled by SDRs is impressive, developers have been challenged to meet the stringent resource and performance requirements often associated with mobile radio technology,” commented David Kleidermacher, chief technology officer, Green Hills Software. “This optimization technique, with its powerful impact on software footprint, will ease the plight of the SDR software developer and enable a compelling price-performance proposition for both designers and end users. Objective Interface is a first-class engineering organization. This collaboration is typical of their commitment to solving the total customer problem.”

“We have long partnered with Green Hills Software on the tight integration between our respective middleware and operating system run-time environments. We have now extended our collaboration, focusing on improvement of the entire development cycle for resource-critical SDR systems,” commented Bill Beckwith, CEO/CTO of Objective Interface Systems. “Three years ago our software defined-radio customers recognized that we had the smallest footprint in the industry, and asked us to find a new solution to further optimize size reductions in the rest of their radios.”

Some companies in the industry have chosen to use the technique, “subsetting.” They subset both the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard and the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) standard, removing functionality in order to achieve their performance objectives. Subsetting, however, has two fundamental problems:

Developers must speculate at which functionality to remove, resulting in inadequate functionality or artificial restraints for many radios or waveforms;
When deviating from the standards, any conformance suite like the JTRS Technology Laboratory (JTeL) JTRS Test Application (JTAP) test suite, will fail.

Beckwith continued, “after rigorous engineering requirements discussions, a new method was created to automatically remove unused C++ virtual functions.” The resulting extensions to Green Hills Software’s MULTI development tools automatically optimize the size of the system, dramatically reducing the size of existing SCA implementations without shortchanging radio designs by departing from standards.

Software-defined radios are built using middleware called the SCA, an open architecture framework that governs the structure and operation of the radio, enabling it to dynamically load and run waveforms and be networked into an integrated system. A typical SCA is built upon CORBA distributed communications services – ORBexpress® - provided by Objective Interface Systems and a POSIX-conformant operating system - INTEGRITY - provided by Green Hills Software. The breadth of functionality provided by the SCA results in a sophisticated software platform that may occupy significant computing resources on the radio, placing a strain on size, weight and power (SWaP).

Dan Mender, director of business development for Green Hills, further discussed his company’s collaboration with Objective Interface: “Numerous major SDR projects use Objective Interface’s ORBexpress CORBA solution with Green Hills INTEGRITY RTOS. Teaming with Objective Interface to further optimize our toolset for SDR made perfect sense. Now we can enable highly-optimized footprint solutions for our many SCA customers without adding risk, scheduling delays, and headaches to their projects caused in the past by custom modifications to standard SCA frameworks attempting to reduce the deployed SDR memory footprint.”

As an early adopter of the SCA, the Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC) has been involved in the evolution and adaptation of the specification. “As the leading provider of SCA core frameworks and waveform development tools in use today, we applaud this joint effort to address the challenges of SDR deployment,” said Claude Bélisle, VP of Satellite Communications and Radio Propagation at the CRC, a long-time partner of Green Hills and Objective Interface Systems. “Our mutual customers will appreciate the value this optimization brings to their development and production efforts.”

The optimization technique identifies and deletes unused portions of this SCA framework, yielding a 50% reduction in memory usage. The optimization technique has been incorporated into the MULTI integrated development environment, part of Green Hills Software’s Platform for Software-Defined Radio: an integrated solution, including development tools, POSIX-conformant operating systems, TCP/IP networking, embedded ORBexpress, SCA frameworks, and waveform development tools, for building reliable and efficient software-defined radios.

Availability

MULTI Version 5 will be available in Q2 2007. ORBexpress is available today from Objective Interface Systems.

About Green Hills Software

Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software, Inc. is the technology leader in device software optimization (DSO) and real-time operating systems (RTOS) for 32- and 64-bit embedded systems. Our royalty-free INTEGRITY® and velOSity™ real-time operating systems, µ-velOSity™ microkernel, compilers, MULTI® and AdaMULTI™ integrated development environments and TimeMachine™ tool suite offer a complete development solution that addresses both deeply embedded and high-reliability applications. Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, with European headquarters in the United Kingdom. Visit Green Hills Software on the web at www.ghs.com.

About Objective Interface Systems

Objective Interface is the worldwide leader of high-performance, real-time and embedded communications middleware solutions. The company provides ORBexpress, a family of high-performance CORBA ORBs, publish-subscribe technology based on the Object Management Group (OMG) Data Distribution Service standard (DDS), and PCSexpress™, secure communications middleware development tools based on the Multiple Independent Levels of Safety/Security (MILS) architecture, to meet the high-performance requirements of military and aerospace, telecommunications, data communications, industrial automation and process control, transportation, robotics and consumer electronics markets. Visit Objective Interface Systems at www.ois.com.

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North American Sales Contact:
Green Hills Software, Inc.
30 West Sola Street,
Santa Barbara, CA 93101,
Tel: 805-965-6044
Fax: 805-965-6343
Website: www.ghs.com
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International Sales Contact:
Green Hills Software Ltd.
Fleming Business Centre
Leigh Road
Eastleigh
Hampshire SO50 9PD
UNITED KINGDOM
Tel: +44 (0)2380 649660
Fax: +44 (0)2380 649661
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Media Contacts:
Green Hills Software, Inc.
Barbel French
Tel: 805-965-6044
Email: bfrench@ghs.com

Media contacts:
Objective Interface Systems, Inc.
Maria Vetrano
Tel: 617-876-2770
Email:maria.vetrano@vetrano.com


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