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

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.

To stay competitive, carmakers and their tier-1 suppliers must meet rising expectations from drivers, passengers and regulators for convenience, reliability and safety. Consumer OSs 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 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 on all major embedded processor architectures, including Power Architecture and ARM with or without Virtualization Extension. As a result, customers have successfully consolidated their software of mixed criticality with consumer OSs, 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.

“Designers of next-gen automotive cockpits see promise in consolidating safety-critical software modules alongside one or more open OS-based modules on powerful processors such as the i.MX 6 application processor,” said Dan Loop, Automotive Business Development Manager of i.MX applications processors, Freescale. “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.”

The INTEGRITY automotive consolidation platform is available today for the i.MX 6 SABRE automotive infotainment board, as well as other leading processors.