BlackBerry introduces QNX Accelerate and announces availability of QNX RTOS and QNX OS

Running in a cloud environment, this milestone for embedded systems development helps enable mission-critical application developers worldwide to accelerate development cycles and reduce time to market for new, innovative solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT).

An industry preview at AWS re:Invent 2022 in November received an enthusiastic response, and shortly the cloud-enabled QNX RTOS and QNX OS for Safety will be widely available to mission-critical embedded systems developers across industries including automotive, robotics, medical devices, industrial controls and aerospace & defence.

“Our market leading QNX Neutrino OS and safety certified QNX OS are now powered by the cloud to help our customers reduce complexity, accelerate innovation and cut costs throughout the entire product lifecycle. Our foundational OS software in the cloud is also a core helper for our customers who are adopting third party tools for simulation and validation at scale,” said Grant Courville, Vice President, Products and Strategy, BlackBerry QNX. “We’re thrilled to have taken an important step in our journey towards providing environmental parity between embedded systems and the cloud by making our QNX OS for Safety available on AWS.”

At CES 2023, BlackBerry QNX will showcase the QNX Neutrino RTOS as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), running on an instance of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. The demonstration will illustrate how developers can leverage ‘hardware in the cloud’ to help streamline the development, testing, and integration of foundational automotive software.

Early access versions of the OS in the Cloud project were made available to select OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, including Marelli and Continental, both leading Tier 1 global automotive suppliers who are currently trailing the solution in the development of their next generation automotive technology.

“Migrating our core software stack to the QNX cloud has been a game-changer for our virtual software development and validation efforts, significantly boosting the efficiency of our developers and improving overall time-to-market for new features in the vehicle. This is essential for Continental Automotive Edge (CAEdge) our modular multi-tenant hardware and software framework that connects the vehicle to the cloud,” said Martin Stamm, Technical Lead of the CAEdge framework at Continental. “The environmental parity between the Graviton instances on AWS and the physical vehicle computer allow us to directly deploy the same binaries to the cloud and to the vehicle, marking a very significant first step in our vision towards delivering Software Defined Vehicles, that are built, tested and validated virtually in software before being physically created. We are on our way towards an Automotive Metaverse-like developer environment and QNX will ensure we get there.”

“At AWS, we’re dedicated to providing a path for the auto industry to a software-defined future, combining the power of the cloud with the expertise of our team, our customers, and our AWS Partners,” said Wendy Bauer, General Manager of Automotive at AWS. “We saw palpable excitement at our AWS re:Invent conference and now at CES OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers like Continental are reaching new, significant milestones. I’m confident the industry will realise its vision of transformation with the power of AWS Graviton2 processors, the elasticity of the cloud, and environmental parity throughout the development process.”

BlackBerry’s full suite of automotive offerings, including BlackBerry Accelerate, will be demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas from January 5 – 8, 2023, at the Las Vegas Convention Centre. Visit BlackBerry at Booth in the West Hall.