Renesas Electronics Corporation and BlackBerry Limited have expanded partnership and eye 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.

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.

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. 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.