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January 11, 2:47 EST
MANASSAS, Va. -- Officials at Athena Technologies in Manassas, Va., are using the MULTI 2000 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from Green Hills Software in Santa Barbara, Calif., to develop flight control and navigation system software for Athena's GuideStar GS-111 advanced flight control system.
GuideStar, equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, is a fault-tolerant, miniature flight control system that enables aircraft and ground vehicles to monitor their position, flight attitude, and speed relative to the Earth. GuideStar is used in a variety of vehicles, such as fixed-wing aircraft, stealthy turbojet aircraft, and vertical takeoff and landing vehicles.
"The MULTI IDE greatly simplified the development of the high-availability code we needed for our GuideStar system," says Chris Brown, a software engineer for Athena Technologies. "The MULTI debugger's tight integration with the [real-time operating system] and its support for task-level debugging were particularly helpful."
A Motorola MPC555 processor powers the GuideStar system, Green Hills officials say. The MULTI IDE is used to develop PowerPC software that enables GuideStar to correlate data from rotational rate sensor, accelerometers, magnetometers, and a GPS receiver to determine position, speed and flight attitude of the vehicle, company officials say. It uses position, speed and flight attitude to either autonomously navigate preplanned routes or follow a pilot's inputs. It communicates its status along with a video signal to a remote ground station.
"Excellent service was also a key factor in our selection of Green Hills Software," adds Leslie Farkas, a software engineer with Athena Technologies. "In addition to assisting us in developing bootstrap code, Green Hills provided a new debug server before it was released to the general public."
"The MULTI IDE is fast emerging as the preferred development environment for high-availability applications like GuideStar," claims John Carbone, vice president of marketing for Green Hills. "MULTI is designed from the ground up to support the large programming teams working on high-availability applications like navigation systems, and its advanced [real-time operating system] integration makes it the preferred choice for high-availability applications."
MULTI, together with Green Hills Software's family of optimizing C, C++, EC++, and Ada95 compilers, automates all aspects of embedded software development. Featuring a window-oriented editor, source-level debugger, graphical program builder, and run-time error checker, MULTI also includes a version control system, instruction set simulator, performance profiler, and real-time EventAnalyzer. Green Hills officials say.
The heart of the MULTI IDE is the MULTI source-level debugger, company officials say. The debugger supports process- and system-level debug, provides a separate window for each process, supports mixed assembly and high-level language formats, and includes a language-sensitive expression evaluator. The MULTI debugger also features incremental debug capability, a graphical memory viewer, and specialized support for C++, including an object oriented class browser, namespace support, and C++ function navigation. MULTI's debugger is fully real-time operating system (RTOS) aware, which enables designers working with advanced RTOSes like INTEGRITY and ThreadX, to debug, monitor, and tune their applications at the task level.
For more information on the MULTI 2000 Integrated Development Environment or Green Hills Software, contact the company by phone at 805-965-6044, by email at sales@ghs.com, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.ghs.com. For more information on GuideStar or Athena Technologies contact Ben Motazed by phone at 703-331-1068, by email at bmotazed@hiflight.com, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.hiflight.com.
Military & Aerospace Electronics
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