By combining TASKING’s embedded development tools with WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems (WHIS) SAFERTOS®, engineering teams gain a complete, OS-aware toolchain for debugging, testing, and certifying safety-critical applications to IEC 61508, ISO 26262, DO-178C and other industry standards.
TASKING announced a tighter integration between its unified toolchain and WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems (WHIS)’s pre-certified safety real-time operating system SAFERTOS®. With TASKING’s embedded software trace tool (SWAT), developers can perform comprehensive OS-aware timing analysis without dedicated on-chip hardware trace support.
In safety-critical embedded systems, precise timing is unquestionably critical. In a flight control system, for example, missing the response window by even a fraction of a millisecond can be the difference between a controlled maneuver and a loss of aircraft control. However, not every system-on-chip (SoC) supports hardware-based trace, and many either lack the required features or cannot expose trace pins due to design constraints. Even when it is possible to remodel hardware-trace-compatible SoCs into existing designs, it is costly and time-consuming. The TASKING and WHIS integration bridges this hardware gap by providing access to crucial timing data and enabling engineers to leverage TASKING’s extensive range of debug and test tools to support and accelerate the development and verification of applications running on SAFERTOS.
SAFERTOS and TASKING’s tool chain bring together a trusted RTOS and a comprehensive embedded software development environment, helping engineers work more efficiently, troubleshoot issues more effectively, and focus on delivering high-quality embedded software.
“With this new level of integration, development teams designing safety-critical systems around SAFERTOS have access to the comprehensive debug, test, and verification capabilities of the TASKING unified toolchain,” said Janez Ulcakar, Director of Research & Development, TASKING. “This can save precious development time, increase overall reliability, and provide greater confidence in delivering safer systems to customers.”
With SWAT, developers can now build runtime analysis into their development workflow from the start, without any additional hardware changes to board design. In addition, the development environment is OS-aware to deliver the essential features needed to create robust systems, including monitoring task states, stack usage, queue contents, and scheduling behavior.
Faster Certification
As a pre-certified safety RTOS, SAFERTOS delivers superior performance and pre-certified dependability while utilizing minimal resources. With deterministic event handling, SAFERTOS is designed for systems that need precision control or must respond quickly to safety events and place the system into a safe state within a defined time window. SAFERTOS is pre-certified across a wide range of standards, including IEC 61508 and ISO 26262, and includes design support packages that can save years of certification effort.
Applications using SAFERTOS often require compliance with strict safety constraints when debugging and tracing code. With TASKING and SAFERTOS integration, developers can:
- Capture real-time timing data on targets without hardware trace capabilities
- Observe the timing behavior of every state transition, context switch, and key application event in real-time
- Monitor and analyze runtime CPU load and resource usage to gain in-depth understanding of resource bottlenecks
- Assure safe and predictable application behavior using the full depth of real-time profiling and timing analysis provided by the TASKING LDRA test suite.
- Simplify workflows by letting development and verification teams use the same debug interface already present on a target.
- Accelerate development and certification by providing necessary traceability and verification evidence as well as minimizing the need for re-testing
“SAFERTOS and TASKING’s toolchain provide a natural fit for embedded software development,” said Emiliano Costagli, Product Manager at WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems. “The combination brings together a trusted RTOS and a comprehensive development environment, helping engineers work more efficiently, troubleshoot issues more effectively, and focus on delivering high-quality embedded software.”
