Green Hills Software today announced that it has ported its Integrity RTOS to BAE Systems' RAD750, a radiation-hardened version of IBM's PowerPC 750. The RAD750 comes in both processor-only and single-board computer versions. Before today, it was available only without an OS (meaning developers used their own homegrown system) or with Wind River's VxWorks.
The first announced customer for the BAE/Green Hills package is satellite maker Loral. In a prepared statement, Dave Stofko, flight systems software manager at Loral, said the product "represents the state of the art in space-based device software platforms."
In a phone briefing today, Dave Mender, director of business development at Green Hills and the company's main contact for BAE, told me that Integrity's MMU (memory management unit) features are especially handy in space, where random solar radiation can actually flip bits, a little problem known as a Single Event Upset, or SEU. Integrity's MMU features means developers segment components, so if a SEU does occur, it takes down only one component rather than the entire system. Also, developers can program the system to monitor components, then reload and restart any component that fails. For example, Mender says, a system could be programmed to receive a reading from a single component every 60 seconds; then, if more than a minute passed between readings, the system would "assume" that the component had failed, and automatically reload and restart it.
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