Aitech Defense Systems Inc., the world's first and largest independent manufacturer of open architecture electronic boards and subsystem level products for harsh, environmentally-demanding defense and aerospace applications, now offers full board support packages (BSPs) for Green Hills INTEGRITY version 5.0 real-time operating system (RTOS) to facilitate system integration and reduce development time for designers. The BSPs are available for a number of Aitech's boards and systems.  

Containing prebuilt kernel images, the BSPs employ the latest in RTOS technology to enable interaction with advanced graphics and communication interfaces.  Also included is installation documentation that details how to set up the development environments for both target and host as well as information on building and downloading a custom kernel image and running customer-specific application code.  

Most recently, the BSPs supporting INTEGRITY version 5.0 were added to Aitech's high performance, rugged 6U single-slot VME C108 single board computer (SBC) with an 8 GB USB SSD (solid state drive), used in both new and legacy military embedded applications.  For newer applications, the C108 offers up to 1.4 GHz of processing power via the PowerPC (PPC) MPC7448 processor, the highest performing Freescale PowerPC.  For legacy applications, the SBC features pin-to-pin backplane and I/O compatibility with previous Aitech processor boards employing the PPC MPC74xx processor family, allowing easy, cost-effective upgrades to newer technology.  

The low power, single-width M705, a compact, multi-I/O PCI mezzanine card (PMC) that provides a variety of configuration options for the highest levels of flexibility in different I/O environments, also benefits from the new BSPs.  The M705 features an unprecedented level of PMC density with up to five dual-channel, dual-redundant MIL-STD-1553B channels, 16 ARINC-429 receive channels and eight ARINC-429 transmit channels, up to six RS-232/422/485 serial channels and eight opto-isolated digital discrete input channels, all of which reduce the number of I/O cards required when developing subsystems.  

The latest version of INTEGRITY, a secure RTOS, uses hardware memory protection to isolate and protect both itself and user tasks from incorrect operation caused by accidental errors or malicious tampering.  Its object-oriented design allows precise access control and verification of the security and integrity of data, communications, individual components and the system as a whole. With strict adherence to provable resource requirements, INTERGRITY allows an embedded system designer to guarantee resource availability while ensuring real-time performance for security and protection, unlike other memory protected operating systems.