Mr. John Wall reports

BLACKBERRY QNX AND RENESAS ELECTRONICS AMERICA COLLABORATE TO DEVELOP AN AUTOMOTIVE-GRADE TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM FOR AUTONOMOUS DRIVING; THE COMPANIES' SELF-DRIVING CAR HITS THE TRACK AT CES 2017

BlackBerry Ltd. and Renesas Electronics America Inc. put their joint autonomous driving technology platform in motion today on a test track at CES 2017. Based on the 2017 Lincoln MKZ car model, the self-driving prototype vehicle demonstrates Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Level 4 capabilities, and uses integrated hardware, software and various sensors to detect obstacles on the road, recognize stop signs and cross traffic at intersections, and perform automatic lane changes, all in a safe and secure manner.

The autonomous driving Lincoln MKZ is powered by BlackBerry QNX's Neutrino real-time operating system (OS) and QNX platform for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), running on the Renesas R-Car H3 system-on-a-chip (SOC) platform, showing that it is possible to build autonomous drive solutions on currently available hardware and software.

"The collaboration with Renesas supports BlackBerry's mission to accelerate the commercial realization of connected and autonomous driving vehicles by developing production-ready software independently and in collaboration with partners," said John Wall, senior vice-president and head of BlackBerry QNX. "BlackBerry's QNX Neutrino real-time OS and QNX ADAS technology, along with the Renesas R-Car H3 SoC, provides a foundation on which secure and safety-certifiable applications can be built. Customers now have a credible path from the research environment to ISO 26262 safety-certified production systems."

The Lincoln MKZ is equipped with key autonomous driving sensors such as light detection and ranging, radar, cameras, global positioning systems, and inertial measurement units, and makes use of an advanced sensor input framework, middleware, as well as sophisticated sensor fusion and control algorithms. The QNX platform for ADAS processes data generated from the sensors in real time, and also records and plays back the data off-line for feature development and testing.

The autonomous driving vehicle features centralized decision making, fail-operational use cases and runs on three Renesas R-Car H3 SoCs configured to implement a triple redundant voting scheme for high system reliability using QNX OS for safety. A fourth R-Car H3 SoC is used for front-facing camera algorithms, along with BlackBerry QNX's multicamera framework. These features demonstrate that a production-oriented OS and ADAS platform from BlackBerry QNX can be used for SAE Level 4 autonomous drive scenarios today.

"Autonomous vehicle development teams face significant challenges in transitioning from research and development to systems that meet automotive power, safety and quality standards in a real-world environment," said Amrit Vivekanand, vice-president of automotive business unit at Renesas Electronics America. "Through this collaboration on the self-driving prototype, Renesas and BlackBerry QNX are providing the teams access to an open laboratory and real-world environment, enabling them to accelerate autonomous driving production adaptation by providing low-power, certified functional safety hardware and software solutions."

Built around the ARM Cortex-A57/A53 cores, the Renesas R-Car H3 SoC realizes powerful automotive computing performance that enables the processing of large amounts of information accurately in real time. The R-Car H3 achieves 40,000-Dhrystone-million-instruction-per-second processing performance for enhanced processor power and features the on-chip IMP-X5 parallel programmable engine, which is optimized for interoperation with the central processing unit.

The R-Car H3 also features the PowerVR GX6650 as the 3-D graphics engine with the power to run key algorithms and display information with low latency. With high performance and compliance to ISO 26262 (ASIL-B) standard for automotive functional safety, the R-Car H3 SoC can be used as an automotive computing platform that supports a wide range of applications, including advanced driving safety support systems and in-vehicle infotainment systems.

Supporting the vision of BlackBerry QNX's recently announced autonomous vehicle innovation centre, the goal of this autonomous vehicle project is to enable the research community and industry partners to leverage the core software and hardware platform from BlackBerry QNX and Renesas, respectively, as the foundation to create a solution for automated and autonomous drive vehicles.

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