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Embedded Systems Conference, Chicago, IL. Booth #100. June 3, 2002 -- Green Hills Software, Inc., the world's fastest growing and now second largest real-time operating system (RTOS) company, today announced a powerful system design tool that makes it easier for application developers to take advantage of the INTEGRITY RTOS's virtual address spaces and secure interprocess communication channels. The new tool, known as Integrate™, is available immediately with INTEGRITY 4.0.

Integrate's graphical front-end makes it easy for system designers to configure the system's kernel and address spaces, tasks, semaphores, connections, clocks, and other objects. For example, developers can add new application address spaces simply by right-clicking on the "canvas" and selecting the "Add Address Space" option. Similarly, they can add new tasks to a particular address space or create connections between address spaces by simply clicking inside the space and selecting the appropriate option.

Integrate clearly separates address spaces so that they can be easily viewed and distinguished from one another, making it easy for developers to manage secure applications with multiple virtual address spaces. Integrate also enables system designers to verify system security and guarantee resource availability for critical tasks for maximum security.

Integrate's powerful navigation capabilities make it easy for designers to search for and locate address spaces and tasks that are not in the viewable area of the canvas. This makes it easy to handle large systems consisting of hundreds of address spaces and thousands of tasks in a seamless fashion. Integrate is also context-sensitive, simplifying development by offering options that are relevant only to the selected location and system state.

"The ability to utilize multiple virtual address spaces greatly simplifies debugging while enhancing safety, security, and testability," said John Carbone, vice president of marketing at Green Hills Software. "However, it can also add complexity, as developers must configure each address space. Integrate greatly simplifies the set-up process, making it much easier to use than competitive RTOSes."

INTEGRITY is a secure, fast, deterministic, real-time operating system optimized for embedded applications that place a premium on safety, reliability, real-time performance, and testability. Utilizing a processor's memory management (MMU) facilities, INTEGRITY builds a firewall between the kernel and user tasks that prevents errant or malicious code from corrupting other user tasks or the kernel. INTEGRITY also delivers maximum responsiveness and determinism by running with interrupts continuously enabled and guaranteeing access to the CPU and memory for critical tasks.

INTEGRITY connections facilitate message passing among tasks, whether those tasks reside in the same address space, in a different address space, or even on separate processors. These messages can be used to transmit immediate data, buffers, kernel objects, and links to kernel objects. They can also be used to create message chains. These chains, which support scatter/gather transmission and both synchronous and asynchronous transfers, make it easier to pass lists and C++ objects.

Integrate produces ASCII configuration files that provide a detailed layout of the system in a convenient format for printing. This ASCII file is also used as input to Green Hills Software's MULTI® Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which is used to build and debug the actual INTEGRITY application image. INTEGRITY 4.0's Integrate GUI is fully backwards compatible with configuration files created using previous releases of INTEGRITY.

More on Green Hills Software, Inc.

Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software Inc. is the technology leader for real-time operating systems and software development tools for embedded systems. Green Hills Software's royalty-free INTEGRITY® real-time operating system and the ThreadX real-time operating system, fully integrated with its market leading compilers and MULTI® Integrated Development Environment, provide a total development and run-time solution that addresses both deeply embedded and maximum-reliability applications.

Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, with European headquarters in the United Kingdom. For more information on Green Hills Software products, call 805-965-6044, email sales@ghs.com or visit us on the web at www.ghs.com.

Green Hills Software, the Green Hills Software logo, and MULTI are registered trademarks, and INTEGRITY, Green Hills Probe, EventAnalyzer and Integrate are trademarks of Green Hills Software, Inc.
 
All other trademarks (registered or otherwise) are the property of their respective companies.