Renesas and Blackberry to collaborate for new automotive cockpit systems

Renesas Electronics corporation, a Japan-based supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions and BlackBerry, an enterprise software and services company, announced that they are expanding their partnership to offer an integrated virtualisation, functional safety and secure development environment for the Renesas R-Car system-on-chip (SoC) devices. Using BlackBerry’s QNX software, it was developed as part of the companies’ ongoing strategic relationship to advance autonomous and connected driving technology.

The new development environment is said to be an expansion of Renesas’ software package lineup for the R-Car automotive computing platform, which allows automotive cockpit system designers to quickly develop advanced cockpit systems and improve the user experience. It is based on the Renesas R-Car family and features BlackBerry's QNX Software Development Platform 7.0 and QNX Hypervisor 2.0 virtualisation software. It also provides access to the extensive set of software products developed by BlackBerry, allowing designers to leverage the multimedia and HMI-related software for cockpit graphics systems development.

The development environment takes full advantage of the virtualisation functions available in Renesas R-Car devices. This contributes to building functionally safe digital cockpit systems by isolating functions such as cluster and navigation, thereby ensuring that a fault in one area cannot corrupt another. The QNX Hypervisor 2.0 allows disparate guest operating systems such as Android and Linux to execute independently on a single R-Car device.

John Wall, senior vice president and head of QNX at BlackBerry said, “Together, BlackBerry and Renesas are enabling our customers to rapidly introduce safe and secure, high-performance cockpit systems.”

Masayasu Yoshida, senior director of automotive technical customer engagement division at Renesas said, “For Renesas, a company that strives to provide safe and secure solutions, BlackBerry is the best possible partner and we plan to continue our joint development efforts moving forward."

The demand for highly reliable, fully integrated hardware and software is rapidly increasing in markets like China, where there is a need for the fastest possible development velocity in connected transportation. Moving forward, Renesas and BlackBerry will continue to accelerate their development of integrated cockpit systems and connected car systems, while strengthening their joint efforts for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and full-scale Electronic Control Unit (ECU) integration.