Santa Barbara, CA. January 24, 2000 - Green Hills Software today announced that its MULTI® 2000 Integrated Development Environment has been selected by Digital Harmony™ Technologies, Inc., to develop the software stack for a complete IEEE-1394 audio/video node controller solution based on the ARM7 Thumb® processor. Written in C, the 1394 stack runs on Express Logic's ThreadX™ real-time operating system.

Digital Harmony's IEEE-1394 design allows versatile, high-speed, and inexpensive connections between personal computer peripherals and a variety of consumer electronics devices (e.g. DVD players, camcorders and set-top boxes). This standard interconnect enables up to 63 devices within a subnet to be directly connected at speeds of 100, 200, or 400 Mbit/sec. Larger networks of up to 64,000 devices can be created by linking up to 1023 subnets, all on a single bus.

"We are extremely pleased that Digital Harmony picked us for this project," said John Carbone, vice president of marketing at Green Hills Software. "MULTI 2000, together with our optimizing compilers, takes full advantage of the ARM processor's memory and power saving features, making it ideal for quickly developing fast, compact programs for consumer applications that place a premium on low cost and small code size."

"Our engineering staff purchased Green Hills' software tools for their rich feature set, reasonable price and responsive technical support," said George Jaquette, chief operating officer at Digital Harmony. "We were particularly impressed with the development environment's thorough support for our chosen real-time operating system - ThreadX."

The MULTI environment automates all aspects of software development for ARM processors, including the ARM7™, ARM7TDMI™, ARM7500FE™, ARM9E, and StrongARM® processors. Available with C, C++, EC++, and FORTRAN optimizing compilers, MULTI features a source-level debugger, project builder, text editor, version control system, graphical browser, performance profiler, and run-time error checker. MULTI also features an instruction set simulator, which runs on a host PC or workstation and allows programmers to develop and test code without the need for target hardware. The MULTI IDE is available for Windows 95, Windows NT, and UNIX host platforms.

Green Hills C/C++ compiler takes full advantage of the ARM's Thumb® architecture extensions, which enable designers to achieve significant reductions in code size without compromising performance. To help embedded systems programmers maximize performance and efficiency and make size/speed tradeoffs, the MULTI development environment provides a run-time execution profiler called CodeBalance™. CodeBalance lets users trade off reduced code size for increased performance with an easy-to-use GUI. The user can select limits for performance or code-size, and CodeBalance automatically optimizes the other until the selected limit is reached.

More on Green Hills Software

Incorporated in 1982, Green Hills Software, Inc., is a leading supplier of software development tools for 32- and 64-bit embedded systems. Green Hills offers a family of optimizing Ada, C, C++, FORTRAN and Pascal compilers. The company also offers a software development environment known as MULTI that automates the compile-edit-build-debug cycle by integrating advanced facilities such as an RTOS-aware source-level debugger, profiler, program builder and source code control system.

Green Hills' tools support all major advanced microprocessor families and target environments, including instruction set simulators, ROM Monitors, commercial and home grown real-time operating systems (RTOS) and in-circuit emulators (ICE).

Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA., and has US offices in California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida. International headquarters are located in the United Kingdom, with offices in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. For sales information on Green Hills Software products, please call 1-805-965-6044 or email inquiries to sales@ghs.com.

More On Digital Harmony Technologies

Digital Harmony powered the world's first multi-vendor IEEE-1394 home entertainment system in early 1999. Based in Seattle, Digital Harmony Technologies Inc. www.digitalharmony.com sells standard hardware/firmware modules for adding high-speed 1394 interfaces to audio/video devices (e.g., DVD players, A/V receivers, televisions, etc.) Digital Harmony Certification Centers™ test all devices for compatibility before they are sold at retail; the Digital Harmony logo-the consumer's seal of approval-indicates that the device will operate harmoniously with others in a home entertainment system. Digital Harmony Technologies' customer list includes Boston Acoustics, Denon, harman/kardon, Meridian Audio, Onkyo, Panja, Peavey Electronics and Stellar One.