"Until now," said Green Hills President Dan O'Dowd, "we have focused primarily on Unix platforms. However, PCs running Windows NT have emerged as serious embedded software development platforms, especially when you consider price/performance and third-party hardware/software support. For $2,995, you can buy a 200-MHz PentiumPro PC equipped with Windows NT, 32 Mbytes of memory and a 3-Gbyte hard disk. As a result, a large portion of the embedded market is moving to Windows NT, and we expect it to be a significant growth area for Green Hills."

MULTI supports C, C++, FORTRAN, Pascal and Ada 95 software development. Applications developed under MULTI on a Windows NT system can be cross compiled for execution on most major RISC and CISC CPUs, including the PowerPC, 68k, CPU32, ColdFire, SPARC, MIPS, SH, V800, i960, and x86 architectures. The compiled code can run on the target CPU in a bare bones mode: under Green Hills' own velOSity and INTEGRITY real-time operating systems; under Wind River Systems' VxWorks operating system; under custom real-time operating systems; under a variety of processor-specific in-circuit emulators (ICEs); and on targets that support BDM/JTAG interfaces.

The heart of the MULTI environment is an RTOS-aware source-level debugger that features process- and system-level debug capabilities. The debugger supports mixed assembly and high-level language formats, includes a language-sensitive expression evaluator, and provides special support for C++ (such as a Class Browser, object display and template debug capability) and X-Windows debugging.

The MULTI debugger is fully RTOS aware, enabling designers to debug and tune their applications at a task level. With the MULTI debugger, designers can start and stop tasks, set task-specific breakpoints, and monitor OS resources like buffers, queues, and streams. Programmers can also debug new tasks as they are spawned and watch processes as they communicate through pipes and semaphores.

MULTI's debugger can provide a separate window for each process. Within each window, programmers can independently set conditional and temporary breakpoints, single step, and examine local and global variables. Complex expressions and structured elements such as arrays and records can also be displayed. The debugger recognizes pointers and automatically displays the objects that they reference. It also displays a stack trace that simplifies the analysis of hierarchical program structure.

MULTI's run-time error checker detects memory leaks and common program faults such as out-of-bounds array subscript, storing values into variables or bit fields that are too small to hold them, and attempting to access unallocated memory.

MULTI's profiler helps programmers identify hot spots by providing program run-time data on a function by function and line by line basis, performance statistics, code coverage analysis, and more.

MULTI's windowing editor features scroll bars, pull-down menus, and buttons for common commands. The editor is fully configurable, enabling users to change key bindings and alter object (such as scroll bars) behavior based on their application requirements. Programmers can also substitute their own editor.

MULTI's Project Control system simplifies the design of large projects by providing automated build tools that eliminate the need for a make expert. MULTI's Version Control system augments the build tools by simplifying the management of revision levels and multiple project branches of project (i.e., developing two versions of software at the same time).

MULTI is fully integrated with a number of RTOSs and other target environments for seamless Windows NT-hosted embedded development. These environments include Green Hills' own velOSity and INTEGRITY RTOSs, the Green Hills ROM Monitor, Wind River Systems' Tornado/VxWorks, HP Processor Probes and HP 64700 ICEs, Hitachi ICE for SH, Intel i960 ROM Monitor, and systems supporting BDM/JTAG.

For sales information on Green Hills Software's products, please call 1-805-965-6044 or email inquiries to sales@ghs.com.