Companies Expand Partnership To Enable Leading-Edge Automotive Systems

Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions and BlackBerry Limited (NYSE: BB; TSX: BB), today announced they are expanding their partnership to offer an integrated virtualization, 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.

Available today, the new development environment is an expansion of Renesas’ software package lineup for the R-Car automotive computing platform. It allows automotive cockpit system designers to quickly develop advanced cockpit systems and improve the user experience.

The development environment features both the high reliability and rich graphics functions required for integrated cockpit systems. It is based on the Renesas R-Car family, and features BlackBerry’s QNX Software Development Platform 7.0 and QNX Hypervisor 2.0 virtualization 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 virtualization 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.

“We are very proud to build upon our long-standing relationship with Renesas to provide a leading safety-certified development environment solution for the Renesas R-Car system-on-chip (SoC) devices with BlackBerry QNX software,” said John Wall, Senior Vice President and Head of QNX at BlackBerry. “Together, BlackBerry and Renesas are enabling our customers to rapidly introduce safe and secure, high-performance cockpit systems.”

“The combination of BlackBerry and Renesas technology is used in many volume production programs globally. This speaks directly to the quality of the relationship between our companies,” said Masayasu Yoshida, Senior Director of Automotive Technical Customer Engagement Division at Renesas. “BlackBerry QNX software is always highly reliable. 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.