BlackBerry strengthens automotive software portfolio with new safety-certified products

NOVI, Mich., June 06, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TU-Automotive Detroit

BlackBerry Limited (NYSE:BB) (TSX:BB) today announced three new safety-certified automotive software products that will alleviate the challenges of building sophisticated automotive systems to be compliant with ISO 26262, the automotive industry's functional safety standard. BlackBerry's QNX Hypervisor for Safety, QNX Platform for ADAS 2.0, and QNX OS for Safety 2.0 provide the software foundation upon which secure and safety-certified systems can be built, enabling automakers to accelerate development timelines and reduce cost in moving projects from research to production and onto roads.

"While automakers continue to innovate and push hardware and software to their limits, consumers, governments and industry watchers alike share the same concern. Are the cars on the road, managed increasingly by complex software and electronics, reliable and secure?",  said John Wall, SVP and GM of BlackBerry QNX, BlackBerry. "Safety and security are non-negotiable in cars where failure of a system can lead to severe consequences for human life and property. We continually strive to be at the forefront of innovation and these new products conform to the highest level of safety certification adopted by the industry. These products will help OEMs and their tier one suppliers accelerate time to market for their connected and autonomous drive vehicles."

As electronics and software grow in complexity, the challenges to meet functional safety requirements have grown significantly. This puts an increasing burden on every vendor in the supply chain for safety-certified electronic control modules. BlackBerry's new automotive solutions have been safety-certified to ISO 26262 standards to alleviate these challenges and improve time to market.

QNX Hypervisor for Safety - Safety and Security through Secure Virtualized Isolation

QNX Hypervisor for Safety is ISO 26262 safety-certified and builds upon the virtualization technology of the QNX Hypervisor 2.0 to enable secure and reliable consolidation of multiple sub-systems (virtual domains) on a single System on Chip (SoC). Using the QNX Hypervisor for Safety, developers can partition and isolate safety-critical systems from non-safety critical systems, ensuring that critical systems are isolated and can run safe in the event of an anomaly. The QNX Hypervisor for Safety also includes a Hypervisor Safety Manual, which provides instructions for automotive system architects who design products for functional safety.

QNX Platform for ADAS 2.0 - Reliable Decision-Making Amidst a Flood of Sensor Data

QNX Platform for ADAS 2.0 enables automotive tier ones and OEMs to build a full range of automated driving systems, such as informational ADAS modules that provide a 360^° view of a vehicle and sensor fusion systems that combine data from multiple sources. In an autonomous car, the software must process a flood of data from sensors such as cameras, LiDAR and radar in real time to make decisions that control the vehicle. This requires highly efficient, safety-certified and secure software that can make use of special purpose hardware (accelerators) for vision processing and deep neural-net based machine learning algorithms. QNX Platform for ADAS 2.0 is a comprehensive framework designed to provide high throughput to handle the massive quantity of sensor data that needs to be processed.

QNX OS for Safety 2.0 - Built for Mission- and Safety-Critical Systems

QNX OS for Safety 2.0 is a new software solution that automakers and embedded developers can use to build mission-critical, safety-certified systems for connected or autonomous vehicles. Based on BlackBerry's most advanced and secure QNX SDP 7.0 operating system, the new software platform reduces development time, risk and cost, delivering both the embedded intelligence and security that are imperative to future generations of vehicles. QNX OS for Safety 2.0 is certified to ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 61508 SIL3 by TÜV Rheinland, an international leader in testing and certification aimed at the sustained development of safety and quality.

QNX Platform for ADAS 2.0 and QNX OS for Safety 2.0 are available now. QNX Hypervisor for Safety will be available this Fall.

BlackBerry has the highest level of automotive certification for functional safety with ISO 26262 ASIL D and decades of experience in powering mission-critical embedded systems in automotive and other industries. As the leader in safety-certified, secure, and reliable software for the automotive industry, BlackBerry currently provides OEMs around the world with state-of-the-art technology to protect hardware, software, applications and end-to-end systems from cyberattacks. BlackBerry's pedigree in safety, security and continued innovation has led to recent automotive design wins with Baidu, Delphi, Denso, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Visteon, Jaguar Land Rover and others.