News & Press

San Diego, CA. COTScon, Booth # 320. December 05, 2001 -- Green Hills Software, Inc. today announced that Athena Technologies selected its MULTI® 2000 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to develop flight control and navigation system software for its GuideStar GS-111 advanced flight control system. Equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, GuideStar is a fault-tolerant, miniature flight control system that allows aircraft and ground vehicles to monitor their position, flight attitude, and speed relative to the Earth. GuideStar is used in a wide range of vehicles, including fixed-wing aircraft, stealthy turbojet aircraft, and vertical takeoff and landing vehicles.

A Motorola MPC555 processor powers the GuideStar system. The MULTI IDE is used to develop PowerPC software that allows GuideStar to correlate data from rotational rate sensor, accelerometers, magnetometers, and a GPS receiver to determine position, speed and flight attitude of the vehicle. It utilizes position, speed and flight attitude to either autonomously navigate preplanned routes or follow a pilot's inputs. It communicates its status along with a video signal to a remote ground station.

"The MULTI IDE greatly simplified the development of the high-availability code we needed for our GuideStar system," said Chris Brown, Software Engineer for Athena Technologies. "The MULTI debugger's tight integration with the RTOS and its support for task-level debugging were particularly helpful."

"Excellent service was also a key factor in our selection of Green Hills Software," added Leslie Farkas, Software Engineer with Athena Technologies. "In addition to assisting us in developing bootstrap code, Green Hills provided a new debug server before it was released to the general public."

"The MULTI IDE is fast emerging as the preferred development environment for high-availability applications like GuideStar," added John Carbone, vice president of marketing for Green Hills. "MULTI is designed from the ground up to support the large programming teams working on high-availability applications like navigation systems, and its advanced RTOS integration makes it the preferred choice for high-availability applications."

MULTI, together with Green Hills Software's family of optimizing C, C++, EC++, and Ada95 compilers, automates all aspects of embedded software development. Featuring a window-oriented editor, source-level debugger, graphical program builder, and run-time error checker, MULTI also includes a version control system, instruction set simulator, performance profiler, and real-time EventAnalyzer™.

The heart of the MULTI IDE is the MULTI source-level debugger. The debugger supports process- and system-level debug, provides a separate window for each process, supports mixed assembly and high-level language formats, and includes a language-sensitive expression evaluator. The MULTI debugger also features incremental debug capability, a graphical memory viewer, and specialized support for C++, including an object oriented class browser, namespace support, and C++ function navigation. MULTI's debugger is fully RTOS aware, which enables designers working with advanced RTOSes like INTEGRITY® and ThreadX®, to debug, monitor and tune their applications at the task level.

About Green Hills Software

Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software, Inc. is the technology leader for real-time operating systems and software development tools for 32- and 64-bit embedded systems. Green Hills Software's royalty-free INTEGRITY® and ThreadX® real-time operating systems, 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.

About Athena Technologies, Inc.

Athena Technologies, Inc. was created in 1998 to produce a new generation of digital control systems and products based on a unique collection of patented algorithms that permit a total system dynamics management solution. This software-based adaptive control methodology exploits the modern digital computer and its ability to assess and manage events in real time. Athena's state-of-the-art control technology enables simpler control system designs that are more robust and capable than other contemporary approaches, while minimizing computer throughput and memory requirements.

Athena Technologies, Inc. is located in Manassas, VA. For more information on Athena Technologies, Inc., contact Ben Motazed at 703-331-1068, email bmotazed@hiflight.com.

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