Green Hills Software’s MULTI has flourished as an integrated development environment (IDE) in the embedded space along with the likes of Microsoft’s Visual Studio (see “Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015: A Great Combination”) and the plethora of IDEs based on the open-source Eclipse project.
MULTI 7 arrives as the latest in a long line of IDEs from Green Hills (Fig. 1). The multilingual environment handles C, C++, and EC++, as well as Ada. It’s integrated with Green Hills Integrity and µ-velOSity RTOSs, plus major operating systems like Linux, Windows, VxWorks, ThreadX, and OSE. The C/C++ compiler supports clean coding conventions such as MISRA 2004 in addition to the GHS Standard Mode.
The company’s DoubleCheck static-analysis tool works with MULTI. It runs faster than typical static-analysis tools, thus reducing development-cycle time. MULTI’s run-time error checking complements DoubleCheck.
Thanks to seamless multicore debugging support, developers familiar with single-core debugging can move into a multicore environment. The Target List display highlights system components hierarchically, which helps simplify debugging and makes it easier to see relationships among applications, address spaces, tasks, and threads. The MULTI OSA Explorer provides information about the kernel objects, tasks, and resources. Also, the EventAnalyzer tracks system events and when they occur.
MULTI supports Green Hills tools like TimeMachine, a hardware trace tool that allows developers to run an application backward in time. Its PathAnalyzer highlights the call stack operation over time (Fig. 2). TimeMachine can even debug virtual-memory applications.
MULTI 7, which runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris, supports a wide range of 32- and 64-bit chip families. Overall, MULTI meets functional safety standards, including IEC 61508:2010 (Industrial), EN 50128:2011 (Railway) and ISO 26262:2011 (Automotive). It also satisfies SIL 4 (Safety Integrity Level) and ASIL D (Automotive Safety Integrity Level), and is certified by TÜV NORD and exida.