Freescale Chooses Green Hills Software’s Development Tools for Automotive Microcontrollers

Leading automotive carmakers and tier 1 suppliers in North America and Europe now use Green Hills Software’s MULTI integrated development environment (IDE), optimizing C/C++ compilers and high-speed hardware probes to reduce their cost and time-to-market while creating small-footprint, high-performance production and high-quality software for airbags, gateways, brakes, low-end engines and entry-level instrument clusters.

TRW Automotive, a global leader in automotive safety, produces advanced active systems in braking, steering, suspension and sophisticated occupant safety systems, including airbags, seat belts and steering wheels. Jim Pawloski, global chief engineer at TRW states, “We carefully benchmarked and evaluated different processor and software tools configurations for our next-generation airbag crash sensor ECU. We selected the Freescale - Green Hills solution, because they clearly provided us superior performance at a competitive cost.”

Carmakers and their tier 1 suppliers throughout the world have sold millions of automobiles and trucks with embedded controllers running software built with Green Hills Software’s tools, because they help satisfy stringent software quality, performance, and cost-efficiency requirements.

“Green Hills delivers exceptional code efficiency with its Power Architecture compilers and toolchain – a key ingredient for the success of our MPC56xx Power Architecture microcontroller families,” said Ray Cornyn, director of automotive microcontrollers at Freescale Semiconductor. “We are pleased that mutual customers are seeing outstanding performance and minimal footprint from the combination of the Green Hills software and our MPC56xx MCUs.”

Freescale chose Green Hills Software as a key software launch partner for the MPC560x and MPC563x MCU families. The MULTI IDE and high-speed Nexus hardware probes for the jointly developed automotive 32-bit MCUs includes several automotive-tuned technologies and services, including:

For the jointly developed MCUs, Green Hills used its advanced technologies to develop specific optimizations, including CodeFactor link time optimization, pipeline scheduling and automatic SDA (small data area) optimizations.