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Northrop Grumman Selects Green Hills Software's INTEGRITY®-178B RTOS For Use In Navigation System For Airbus And Other Airframe Manufacturers

INTEGRITY-Based Fiber Optic Gyro Navigation System to Provide 4x Improvement In Reliability
Santa Barbara, CA. January 29th, 2003 -- Green Hills Software, Inc. today announced that its INTEGRITY-178B real-time operating system has been selected by Northrop Grumman Corporation's Navigation Systems Division for use in an inertial navigation system that Northrop is developing for Airbus single-aisle, long-range and A380 aircraft. Green Hills Software also announced that its MULTI® Integrated Development Environment and DO-178B certification package have been selected by Northrop to develop and certify the INTEGRITY-based software that will fly in Airbus inertial navigation systems.
 
Northrop Grumman's LTN-101E Global Navigation Air Data Inertial Reference System (GNADIRS), slated for deployment aboard Airbus commercial jet liners starting in 2006 and possibly sooner on other commercial transport aircraft, delivers a four-fold increase in reliability over traditional navigation systems, while providing significant reductions in weight and power consumption. Utilizing Northrop Grumman's patented Autonomous Integrity Monitored Extrapolation (AIME™) algorithm, the new system replaces traditional laser gyros and silicon accelerometers with state-of-the-art fiber optic gyros and MEMS silicon accelerometers. The resulting system, which integrates inertial and GPS measurements, provides highly accurate aircraft position information, as well as related information such as attitude, air speed, and aircraft angle of attack.
 
The INTEGRITY-178B RTOS provides real-time multitasking, memory management, interrupt processing, and I/O services for the LTN-101E navigation system application software. The application software, written in C language using Green Hills Software's MULTI IDE, will run on a PowerPC 8250 processor under INTEGRITY-178B. Northrop Grumman will use the Green Hills' DO-178B certification package to ensure that the software used in the LTN-101E meets the strict safety requirements of DO-178B, Level A, the highest level of safety criticality.
 
"INTEGRITY's superior reliability and safety characteristics have made it the RTOS of choice for a broad range of military and commercial aircraft, including Airbus, Joint Strike Fighter, the Sikorsky Helicopter, the B-1B Bomber and the C-17 jet transport plane," said John Carbone, vice president of marketing at Green Hills Software. "Whether the application is being developed using C or Ada, or a combination of both, INTEGRITY provides the most reliable, secure platform for hosting airborne software - and it meets the strictest DO-178B safety requirements."
 
"INTEGRITY's high-reliability credentials, integrated development support, and commercially available DO-178B certification package were key factors in our decision to move from a home-grown RTOS to INTEGRITY," said Don Conners, Director of Commercial Avionic Engineering at Northrop Grumman's Navigation Systems Division. "Green Hills has also impressed us with their excellent support and willingness to provide an RTOS and development tool solution customized to our needs."
 
INTEGRITY-178B is an ARINC-653-compliant, fault-tolerant, hard-real-time operating system designed from the ground up for safety- and mission-critical applications that require the utmost security and fast, predictable response. Utilizing hardware memory protection and offering an optional advanced two-level partition scheduler, INTEGRITY-178B provides complete time, space, and resource partitioning between applications operating on the same hardware platform. INTEGRITY-178B also provides guaranteed resource availability in both the time and space domains. This combination facilitates "robust partitioning" (as defined in ARINC 653), enabling applications that have been assigned different DO-178B safety levels to run concurrently on the same processor.
 
INTEGRITY-178B includes an RTOS simulator (ISIM) that enables programmers to develop and test their code on a PC or workstation without the need for target hardware. INTEGRITY-178B also features a real-time event analyzer (Event Analyzer™) that enables viewing of system and user events in a graphical display.
 
INTEGRITY-178B is tightly integrated with Green Hills Software's MULTI® IDE. Together with Green Hills Software's C/C++/EC++ optimizing compilers, MULTI automates all aspects of embedded software development, including editing, source-level debugging, program building, run-time error checking, version control, and code/performance optimization. MULTI also features an advanced code coverage tool (G-Cover™) that automates structural coverage analysis for application software, including the analysis of DO-178B Table A-7, Objectives 5, 6, and 7 (statement, decision, and MCDC coverage achievement).
 
More on DO-178B
 
Developed by the non-profit Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA) and European Organization for Civil Aviation Equipment (EUROCAE), DO-178B is an internationally recognized standard required for certifying software used in airborne systems and equipment. DO-178B has five certification levels (A through E), the most stringent of which (A) is applied to safety critical systems.
 
About 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 32- and 64-bit embedded systems. Our royalty-free INTEGRITY® RTOS, compilers, MULTI® and AdaMULTI Integrated Development Environments and Green Hills Probe™, offer a complete development 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.
 
Green Hills Software, the Green Hills logo, MULTI and INTEGRITY are registered trademarks. The Green Hills Probe, Slingshot, EventAnalyzer, Resource Analyzer, ISIM, Quick Start, Integrate, G-Cover, GMART, GSTART and Safety Critical Products are trademarks of Green Hills Software Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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