Green Hills Software, a global provider of embedded safety and security, announced a plan for delivering comprehensive support for the new S32Z and S32E real-time processor families from NXP Semiconductors. This will enable safe and secure mixed-criticality execution and consolidation in next-generation zonal and domain vehicle platforms. 

Green Hills Software’s products and expert services will form the industry’s most complete offering of foundational software for the S32Z and S32E processors composed of :

• The ultra-small and fast, ASIL-certified, µ-velocity real-time operating system
• The µ-visor thin type-1 hypervisor that simultaneously hosts multiple guest-operating systems such as AUTOSAR Classic, µ-velOSity, FreeRTOS, Zephyr RTOS, and more
• the ASIL-certified MULTI advanced development environment

The combined hardware-software solution from NXP and Green Hills builds on three decades of successful collaboration between the companies that will enable global OEMs and Tier 1s to dramatically reduce the time and cost of developing and deploying new consolidated domain and zonal architectures and vehicle control at the highest levels of ISO 26262 safety and ISO/SAE 21434 security.

Emerging designs for next-generation vehicle electronics must adapt to accommodate the growth and consolidation of software features and increased complexity in these new architectures. OEMs and Tier 1s will require more computing performance to support these new capabilities and challenges.

A key challenge is to consolidate the necessary hardware and software in a manner that guarantees freedom from interference for critical functions while providing uncompromised real-time performance, low cost, and extensive design flexibility for future adaptations. At the same time, advanced multicore, multi-OS software development tools are needed to increase developer productivity while reducing the time and cost to develop and integrate millions of lines of new code.

The combined platform of Green Hills and NXP targeting the S32Z and S32E addresses this challenge.

“We’re pleased to be working with Green Hills to provide our customers a combined solution to accelerate and consolidate safe, real-time applications for emerging domain and zonal vehicle architectures,” said Ray Cornyn, senior VP and GM Vehicle Control and Networking Solutions Business Line at NXP. “Today’s zonal and domain controller ECUs need the high-performance real-time processing of the breakout S32Z and S32E real-time processors combined with a scalable, safe and secure software offering from proven partners like Green Hills.”

“By providing broad production-focused software solutions for NXP’s new multicore S32Z and S32E real-time processor families, joint customers can start immediately developing their next-generation vehicle ECUs with the highest performant, most scalable and configurable offerings available,” added Dan Mender, VP, Business Development, Green Hills Software. “And with this combined hardware-software solution, time to market, and cost to develop, are drastically reduced by starting with production-proven offerings.

The products and services of Green Hills are a complete ecosystem offering of production-focused foundational software in the market, enabling customers to optimize their use of the S32Z and S32E real-time processor families’ unique combination of gigahertz real-time speed, safe multi-application integration, and expansion memory.

The µ-velOSity RTOS is a tiny, fast, and easy-to-program, memory-efficient real-time operating system for multicore designs with ASIL requirements. µ-velOSity needs only a few kilobytes of ROM and boots quickly in a minimum of processor cycles. Its ultra-small context switch time and fast kernel service calls make it ideal for real-time automotive functions.

The µ-visor hypervisor is a thin and efficient type-1 hypervisor designed to safely consolidate concurrently running critical workloads on the Arm Cortex-R52 processors inside NXP S32Z and S32E processors. Its architecture leverages processor features to enforce separation, manage access control and accelerate virtual machine operations, enabling multiple operating systems such as AUTOSAR Classic, FreeRTOS, Zephyr RTOS, and µ-velOSity to efficiently run with freedom from interference. µ-visor features a variety of core scheduling options to meet various ECU consolidation use cases and to ensure extremely low overhead.

This vendor/OS-independent virtualization decouples hardware and software, giving designers greater flexibility for adding new functionality and reusing it on other projects.

Developers using NXP’s S32Z and S32E processors will significantly increase productivity by relying on the Green Hills OS-agnostic MULTI advanced integrated development tools that include Green Hills optimizing C/C++ compilers. The unmatched performance and ASIL certification of Green Hills optimizing C/C++ compilers and run-time libraries for Cortex-R52 have made Green Hills the industry-standard C/C++ compiler since 2016.

When Arm announced the Cortex-R52, they relied on the Green Hills compiler to achieve the “highest in class” performance scores. MULTI also features the industry’s most advanced multicore, multi-OS debugging and visualization features that empower developers to find and fix bugs faster, use less processor memory, and reduce costly software recalls.