Green Hills’ INTEGRITY RTOS available for Freescale’s i.MX 6 SABRE

Green Hills Software has extended its popular INTEGRITY automotive consolidation platform to the Freescale i.MX 6 series Smart Application Blueprint for Rapid Engineering (SABRE) for automotive infotainment board, giving carmakers and their suppliers another processor choice on which to safely and securely consolidate multi-domain cockpit software – digital instrument cluster, entertainment, navigation, driver assistance – into smaller, simpler and less costly configurations.

At the Freescale Technology Forum, Green Hills demonstrated for the first time a Linux guest OS running a GPU-accelerated infotainment system and a fast-boot digital instrument cluster with GPU-accelerated graphics, both running with guaranteed freedom of interference on the INTEGRITY RTOS and Multivisor on a single i.MX 6 SABRE for automotive infotainment board.

“Designers of next-generation automotive cockpits see promise in consolidating safety-critical software modules alongside one or more open operating system-based modules on powerful processors such as the i.MX 6 application processor,” said Dan Loop, automotive business development manager of Freescale i.MX applications processors. “A global roster of mutual customers have already deployed digital instrument clusters built with the i.MX 6 series and INTEGRITY and we look forward to helping customers manage their software complexity with these expanded consolidation capabilities offered by the Green Hills INTEGRITY Multivisor solution coupled with hardware separation capabilities offered by the i.MX family of applications processors.”

To stay competitive, carmakers and their tier-1 suppliers must meet rising expectations from drivers, passengers and regulators for convenience, reliability and safety. Consumer operating systems such as Linux/Android bring open source flexibility, rich middleware frameworks, while safety and security-certified RTOSes are needed to run “mission-critical” applications requiring fast-boot, high-reliability and safety/security. This mushrooming collection of multiple domains of CPU-hungry software systems, each with different levels of criticality, have traditionally required their own processor, screens, cabling and enclosures behind the dashboard.

Combining these subsystems with fewer, powerful processors is a natural step but requires a software platform that guarantees the software functions remain isolated while achieving the necessary performance, connectivity and safety levels. The INTEGRITY RTOS and Multivisor technology provide this trusted execution environment, and have been proven for over 10 years in varied customer environments – industrial, PoS, enterprise, mobile – on all major embedded processor architectures, including Power Architecture® and ARM® with or without Virtualization Extension (ARM VE). As a result, customers have successfully consolidated their software of mixed criticality with consumer operating systems, saving space, weight and cost.

The i.MX 6 SABRE for automotive infotainment targets infotainment, instrument cluster, telematics and rear seat entertainment designs. Based on ARM Cortex®-A9 CPU cores in single-, dual- and quad-core offerings, it supports a wide range of automotive-specific connectivity and multimedia peripherals.

Green Hills Software offers a comprehensive solution for the i.MX 6 series application processors:
• INTEGRITY Multivisor trusted microkernel and system virtualization technology featuring configurable software partitions, real-time and mission-critical processing
• INTEGRITY separation kernel for applications demanding safety, reliability and security
• Native OpenGL 3D & 2D graphics support
• AUTOSAR and OSEK application programming interfaces
• FIPS Certified V2X Client Cryptographic Toolkit (IEEE 1609.2)
• DLM Security Credential Management System (SCMS)
• Toolchain compliant to the highest levels of automotive and industrial safety standards including ISO 26262, IEC 61508 and EN 50128
• MULTI® IDE featuring multicore debugger and many other integrated time-saving tools
• EEMBC®-certified C/C++ compilers for the i.MX6 that outperform competing compilers by as much as 30-35%
• Code quality tools including MISRA C/C++, run-time error checking and DoubleCheck™ static analyzer
• Green Hills JTAG and trace probes for hardware bring-up and low-level debugging