Development platform suits safety- & security-critical design

LDRA has developed such capabilities in partnership with Green Hills Software, resulting in a solution that enables developers to fully trace the behaviour of multicore systems - a critical step forward in achieving regulatory compliance.

LDRA’s uniquely optimised trace technology efficiently captures software runtime dynamics and behaviour from multiple cores. As a result, safety- and security-critical coverage analysis is safely and efficiently aggregated without degrading runtime performance and without sacrificing the integrity of the Green Hills Software multicore application environment. The LDRA tracing technology is integrated with the Green Hills Software development tool chain to provide unprecedented system analysis and debug capabilities.

For the safety- and security-critical multicore market, Green Hills Software provides the INTEGRITY-178 time-variant unified MultiProcessing (tuMP) RTOS. Shipping since 2010, INTEGRITY-178 tuMP provides system and application developers superior flexibility to concurrently schedule and utilise multiple cores within and across applications. As a partitioning enforcing RTOS, applications of different safety and security assurance levels can concurrently execute on a multicore platform. The Green Hills MULTI IDE provides application development for C, C++, and Ada programming languages. The partnership efforts integrate the LDRA structural coverage solution within the MULTI IDE, unifying management of multicore application development, debug, and verification.

With the LDRA multicore instrumentation support, structural coverage analysis can be captured at the individual core or aggregated to provide a multicore system-level view. Results are portrayed graphically, enabling developers to follow the flow of code execution and to assess system behaviour at core and system levels. With structural coverage analysis down to the object-code level available on host and target platforms, the LDRA solution supports the highest levels of safety-critical standards compliance. Automated reports capture testing analysis and techniques, reducing potentially hundreds of hours of documentation needed to achieve compliance.

“LDRA has invested time and research to provide verification tool solutions for safety-critical software developers targeting multicore architectures,” said Dan O’Dowd, Founder and CEO, Green Hills Software. “These efforts have positioned LDRA as the leading provider of high-assurance testing and verification tools for INTEGRITY-178 tuMP systems and enabled users to successfully complete the required compliance activities.”

“Green Hills Software and LDRA have led the certification and compliance markets for decades, delivering software development and testing tools that automate and rigorously enforce safety and security standards,” confirmed Ian Hennell, Operations Director, LDRA. “Thanks to our partnership, for the first time, multicore application developers have the potential of achieving DO-178B/C Level A compliance. That’s a huge step forward for the aerospace and defence industry and offers similar promise for industries such as rail transportation, industrial automation, and automotive.”

With the integration of compliance-optimised development and testing software, software tools now automate multicore software development and test, streamlining multicore development and verification. This permits developers to fully utilise reductions in size, weight, and power (SWaP) provided by multicore systems.