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Green Hills Software is entering the mobile phone software market with a hypervisor for chips with dual ARM Cortex A9 processors. The Multivisor is based on Green Hill's Integrity real time operating system.
"We are focusing on the A9 because it the first real multicore Arm processor that will be popular in the market," said Dave Kleidermacher, CTO of Green Hills.
"All the major chip makers have A9 solutions such as the ST-Ericsson's U8500, Nvidia's Tegra and TI's OMAP4."
This is Green Hills' first move into the commercial mobile phone market.
"We have a number of deployments in the mobile space with handheld radio and the first implementation of the technology was for a mobile handheld radio running a Power architecture device and since then we have a number of different customer adopting the technology," said Gordon Jones, vice president of Green Hills Software's Embedded virtualisation Business Unit.
"We do have Integrity running on secure phones so there are definitely users of this technology who want reliability and security, but none of them are public," said Kleidermacher.
The Multivisor supports both symmetric and asymmetric multiprocessing to allow a range of different uses including reducing the number of processors in the system, running a Secure Execution Mode for security-critical applications such as cryptographic algorithms and protocols used for DRM, critical financial transactions, and firmware authentication.
It can also run two separate operating systems, and this is aimed at the enterprise smartphone market where a phone could run Windows Mobile for the enterprise connections and run Android totally separate for personal use, says Kleidermacher.
"Right now you are forced to decide which operating system to have or have two separate phones," he said.
Nick Flaherty, Barcelona
See also: the Electronics Weekly blog UK Tech Startups, covering news on funding for electronics startups, written by Nick Flaherty
