WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems

The WITTENSTEIN Group was established in 1948 and has grown into a stable and mature global technology company. Originally part of the aerospace group, WHIS is the Group’s centre of excellence for high integrity and safety critical embedded systems design. WHIS is first and foremost a Safety Engineering Company, a key differentiation in the RTOS market, as WHIS have direct experience developing safety critical applications.

WHIS engineers have a profound knowledge of safety critical development, and high integrity development life cycles are well and truly institutionalised within company working practices. Today our primary focus is the development and supply of mission and safety critical RTOS.WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems (WHIS) is a safety systems company that produces and supplies real time operating systems (RTOS) and platform solutions to the Medical, Automotive, Aerospace, and Industrial sectors, increasing application development efficiency whilst reducing risk through third party certification. Our product include:

• SAFERTOS® – the safety critical real time operating system pre-certified to IEC 61508 SIL3 by TÜV SÜD;
• OPENRTOS® - commercial licensing and support for the popular FreeRTOS™;
• Enhanced Security Module – For the highest security-critical environments, WHIS offers the Enhanced Security Module (ESM) to reinforce and strengthen the existing security of our RTOS;
• Board Support Packages, Middleware, and Safety Plugins;
• Training, Consultancy and Support to realise the potential of your design.

Our Relationship with FreeRTOS

WHIS leverage RTOS technology from FreeRTOS.org, the market leading embedded real time operating system. Richard Barry created FreeRTOS while an employee at WHIS. WHIS engineers worked closely with Richard, providing a safety critical upgrade to FreeRTOS, SAFERTOS, as well as the flexible commercial licensing, training, and support that FreeRTOS users needed. SAFERTOS is based on the functional model of FreeRTOS, however it has been completely redesigned by our team of safety experts. Our engineers took the FreeRTOS functional model, subjected it to a full HAZOP, identified all areas of weakness within the functional model and API, and generated a set of safety requirements. The resulting functional and safety requirements sets were put through an IEC 61508-3 SIL 3 development life cycle, the highest possible for a software only component, creating the SAFERTOS code base and Design Assurance Pack.

As FreeRTOS and RTOS share the same functional model upgrading is easy. Many of our customers prototype using the FreeRTOS kernel, and convert to SAFERTOS at the start of their formal development phase.

Included in our free downloads is a manual detailing how to upgrade from the FreeRTOS kernel to SAFERTOS in easy steps.

(#FuSa)