From Concept to Reality: BlackBerry-QNX's Groundbreaking CES Tradition

Thomas Bloor
Business Development Manager, QNX BlackBerry

The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has been growing in importance for the automotive industry over the years. You can hardly fail to notice that this year, as in previous years, the big automakers vie for floor space and attention with the glut of big screen TVs and other consumer goods. As always, BlacBerry QNX will be in the North Hall, proudly in the middle of the big automotive OEMs. 

At CES BlackBerryQNX has an enviable history of bringing concept cars that rival anything on the show floor, with one important difference – ours are not pure flights of fancy, and we show technologies that will become realities in the near future.

We started this trend back in 2010 with an LTE-connected Toyota Prius – 18 months before the first commercial LTE deployment in mid-2011. Working with Alcatel-Lucent to provide the experimental network, we demonstrated Google maps functionality with local search and an embedded Pandora radio app in a car for the first time. Connectivity is standard in many cars today, but in 2010 we demonstrated the future.

2012 brought us a CNET "Best of CES" award for demonstrating cloud-based natural language voice recognition, text-to-speech, and NFC based one-touch Bluetooth pairing.  Simply touching your phone to an NFC reader in the center console automatically paired the phone and car. 

In 2013 we got ahead of the trend for ever larger center stack displays – with detailed 3D maps and voice recognition Keyword Spotting – common today in smartphones but a first in a car. Simply saying "Hello Bentley" enabled you to start interacting with the natural language cloud based voice recognition Powered by AT&T’s Watson. 

2014 took literally us in a different direction. A 21-inch horizontally orientated center stack display extends across the dash, naturally extending the interaction and functionality towards the passenger.  Behind the screens the instrument cluster was integrated with the center stack running both driver information and IVI functions. With seamless controllability across the touch screen, physical buttons, and the jog wheel controls multi-modal input was highlighted across all available functionality. 

Not content with that, we foreshadowed greater integration of ADAS functionality warnings to the driver. In 2014 we warned the driver if local speed limits were exceeded through both the cluster and verbally through text-to-speech, and we followed this up in 2015 with a system that recommends an appropriate speed for upcoming curves based upon driving conditions and the radius of the bend.

So, what innovations will we be showing in 2017? I’m not allowed to tell you just yet but, in a first (for us), we’ll be showing both future and current production technologies and innovations.

Building on our products ranging from in-car acoustics through our comprehensive QNX-CAR application platform and to next generation driver assistance/autonomous drive we will be demonstrating how technology can enhance the user experience and increase safety for drivers and passengers.

While demonstrating technologies that will come to future production vehicles, these cars are not just "show floor wonders" because our automotive knowledge enables us to build demonstrators for the real world, which can be driven, thus allowing technologies to be experienced first-hand.

On 64-bit and roadmap alignment

By Romain Saha
Strategic Alliances Manager
Blackberry QNX
 

One of the coolest things about my job is getting to see all the silicon roadmaps. OK, I’m a nerd. That is not a surprise to anyone I’m sure. Still, there’s a lot of amazing innovation going on. You just haven’t heard about. Yet. And you won’t hear it from me. Sorry.

Except maybe that the embedded world – at least in the areas we play – is going 64-bit. Pretty much already gone 64-bit actually. Intel architecture has been 64-bit for as long as I can remember. ARMv8 is almost exclusively 64-bit. It’s here. It’s real. You can buy it. Pretty much everybody has it.

Graphics is another area that is moving fast. The latest embedded GPUs are really impressive. I know of one chip that actually has two full-blown GPUs on a single die. The things I’m seeing on the bench are amazing. Light-years ahead of where we were only a generation ago.

Roadmap alignment is key for us. We need to make sure our products sing with our silicon partner’s technology. We need to make sure customers can take the latest SoCs and build the things stuff the world wants.

One of the things the world wants these days is a digital cockpit - a unified experience across multiple displays in the cabin.  That is happening today but it takes two SoCs to do it, one for cluster and one for infotainment system. It also takes space, power, cabling, connectors and inter-processor communication. Hassle. Lots of hassle I bet.

The obvious dream is to eliminate all this cost and complexity and just use a single SoC for both. Easy. Except digital instrument clusters and infotainment systems are different. Very different.

Infotainment systems need lots of horsepower. They use lots of memory. Navigation systems alone can drive addressing past 4 Gigabytes. Huge state diagrams. They also need lots of eye-candy. GPU performance is key. Complicated indeed.

Digital instrument clusters need incredibly smooth graphics performance but are relatively simple otherwise. Except that they are safety critical. Enter ISO26262 certification. Overlay that with making sure what you think you are rendering is actually what gets displayed. If the screen says P(ark) and the car is in R(everse) people get hurt. Or worse. Clusters are complicated too.

What do you need to make all this work? For sure you need a 64-bit safety-certified embedded OS. You need a hypervisor with the ability share graphics across virtual machines. You need ISO26262 top to bottom as well as a way to ensure cluster rendered output matches the intended output. And you need an SoC with the juice to make it all happen. That’s a lot. No wonder people think the single chip digital cockpit is still a dream.

If You Hadn’t Noticed the Autonomous Car is Officially The Next Big Thing

Thomas Bloor

BlackBerry QNX 
Business Development                                                                      

So far this year we have seen a surge in press and media attention on the self-driving autonomous car, so much that we can safely say the Autonomous Car is The Next Big Thing. Predictions have been coming thick and fast from the environmental benefits, as apparently every autonomous car is going to be electric, to the potential loss of millions of jobs as taxis and trucks start driving themselves. 

The hype is at least underscored by an element of truth. Big announcements from the automotive industry this year demonstrate what we’ve known for a while: Automotive technology – and especially autonomous vehicles – are speeding up fast.

Most impressively, Ford announced they are investing $182 Million into Pivotal, a Cloud software company, and has announced a complete revamp of their Dearborn campus. Unless you are the escalator repair guy in Building 5, few will miss the 1950’s engineering building’s soon being replaced with a modern campus and architecture designed to support “Ford’s plan to be an auto and mobility company” with “new facilities to further drive innovation and collaboration.”

Every carmaker is lining up media and demonstrations to show their prowess. In an industry that has traditionally been challenged to attract major software talent, automakers are hiring and opening or expanding Silicon Valley offices in order to attract and retain the software engineers they need to compete in the future.

So it comes as no surprise that General Motors quietly acquired Cruise Automation, a San Francisco based company planning to sell Autonomous driving modules that you can retrofit to your existing car. In true Silicon Valley tradition, the acquisition was followed by the announcement that the founders were suing each other over the apparent $1 Billion that GM is paying.

While the fancy offices and lawsuits sound more like Silicon Valley than Detroit it’s all part of the profound change in the industry and signals that the autonomous car is officially The Next Big Thing. While the established industry is pivoting to embrace the new reality that software, not sheet metal, defines their future, they are facing increased competition from a raft of hi-tech startups competing for technical talent.

QNX is at the heart of change in the automotive industry, while often recognized as the operating system behind the industry’s leading infotainment products, the QNX microkernel real time operating system is being built into the heart of next generation safety-critical autonomous systems.

With the industry’s only ISO26262 safety-certified OS, the QNX codebase is a stable POSIX-compliant microkernel free of the code bloat that affects many competing operating systems. This reaps benefits when it comes to developing safety-certified systems for the autonomous car. With the flexibility to do R&D and rapid prototyping on Linux, and then easily port onto the safety-certified kernel, QNX speeds time-to-market and reduces engineering cost.  This comes from the prototype codebase being reused and refined as opposed to being rebuilt for production use.

As the industry is changing so are we. From our suite of products ranging from the Digital Cockpit to Autonomous cars, QNX offers unique solutions spanning the whole car, and make it Safe, Secure, and Reliable.  

We enable the industry to avoid costly and innovation slowing operating system fragmentation across different systems in the car. With the flexibility and capability to form the basis of in car entertainment, driver information, guidance, and safety critical systems, QNX provides the Car OS that is the foundation of the Next Big Thing.