QNX CAR, Nav N Go and the future of Navigation

I still remember the first time I ever saw a navigation system in a car. It was sometime in 2000 and I had just arrived in Japan. Our distributors at the time were taking us to see a customer outside of Tokyo. I was jet lagged and I had a headache and they had the volume turned up loud. We still managed to get lost but I was really impressed by the little machine shouting out turn by turn directions.

In less than a decade, navigation systems have become common – almost ubiquitous. I saw, in a recent article, that in 2007 almost 9 million vehicles shipped with in-vehicle navigation and over 30 million dedicated portable navigation devices were sold. In 2013 the combination of these two categories will exceed 100 million units shipped in a single year. The conventional PND market is even more impressive where the expectation is that over 300 million units will ship in 2013 alone.

It seems to me that companies that are strong in the conventional PND market are well positioned to move into the in-vehicle and dedicated portable navigation units. Nav N Go is just such a company. They supply over 70 consumer electronics companies and are working with the likes of Harman Becker, Clarion and others to bring their technology into the automotive market. At CeBit, earlier this year they demonstrated an initial integration with QNX and have continued to work towards a tighter integration with QNX CAR. We are planning to show this integration at the upcoming Telematics Update Detroit show in early June. If you’d like to see it in action drop me a line.

I wonder how long it will be before paper maps go the way of the dodo?

Romain

Cavium Networks and [QNX] Steal the Show at Interop…

TMCnet Contributor, Rajani Baburajan, highlighted the QNX and Cavium collaboration kicking off at Interop-the networking and communications trade show.

Cavium Networks is a provider of integrated semiconductor products for networking, communications, wireless, storage, video and security applications. QNX supported the Cavium pavilion where the focus was reference designs using the OCTEON multi-core MIPS64 processors.

We showcased our high performance QNX Neutrino operating system showing near linear performance scaling with increasing number of cores. You can read the complete article here:  http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/interop/articles/56601-cavium-networks-partners-steal-show-interop-with-wide.htm

Cheers: Kroy

Power Architecture and the Industrial Market

From its very beginning, QNX has served the industrial market with our products and it continues to be a key focus for us. We have many customers building many products in this segment. We pay a lot of attention to ensure that our products align with the needs of the industrial developer.

 

The industrial market has traditionally built systems based on x86 architecture. In the past year or two, however, we have seen industrial customers choosing the Freescale PowerQUICC family of processors for new designs. I’m not suggesting that everyone is moving away from x86 – just that we are starting to see real demand for Power Architecture in industrial. We have supported these devices for many years to serve the networking market and it is interesting, to me at least, that they are finding homes on the factory floor.

 

There are a few reasons, I think, for the shift. The industrial market is moving from standalone systems to a more connected model where sharing data and control between multiple devices across a network is fundamental to the overall system architecture. Highly integrated processors like the PowerQUICC offer great built-in networking capabilities. Further, the PowerQUICC family of processors has been developed specifically for the embedded market and customers can rest assured that Freescale understands the requirements of the embedded lifecycle. The price points that they are able to hit with these devices are also helping them garner market share.

 

As these devices move into applications like vision systems, high speed scanning and quality control, the burden of computationally intensive processing increases dramatically. System architects typically rely on hardware floating point units to address this requirement.

 

I am happy to report that we introduced e500v2 double precision floating point support in the release of Neutrino 6.4.1. Embedded developers using QNX now have yet another choice for their designs.

 

Romain

Brands to Trust – Campbell Soup and QNX

I just read an article in the Economist’s annual round-up publication, in this case, The World in 2009. (And yes, I know, I’m a bit behind in my reading…) The article was called “Flight to Value – No Nonsense Brands will Prosper in 2009″. It opens with the assertion that on Sept 29 last year when the first Wall Street bail out plan was rejected, the S&P’s 500 index plunged and all of its constituents fell in value except for one, the Campbell Soup Company. The author then goes on to make the prediction that in 2009 the brands that will do well are those that represent good quality, no nonsense, and excellent value for money.

Perhaps there isn’t an obvious correlation between Campbell Soup and QNX – unless you count the fact that I always introduce myself as Linda Campbell “like the soup” to help people with my last name. As such I’m inspired to make this soup to software comparison and observe that like the soup, QNX has fared well during these hard times and much of our ongoing success can also be attributed back to the core values of quality, excellent value, and a no-nonsense approach to business.

I think there is something to be said about conservatively run companies and their staying power. QNX has never been based on a high flying culture; even our CEO travels economy class. During the good times, this type of fiscal responsibility can seem a bit restrictive but it has served us well time and again as we weather various macro-economic storms.

Ironically on the same day as I was reading this old article, I picked up the Wall Street Journal. On page B1 of the April 3 edition, there is an article called “The Perks Keep Flowing Despite Outcry”. This article talks about a company – an auto supplier out of Toledo, OH – that having just recently emerged from bankruptcy protection has managed to spend 2.3 million over the last year on chartered planes. Why? To fly their chairman and vice chairman back and forth to their homes in California.

Maybe their shareholders are wondering if this type of expenditure represents a no nonsense approach to business and good value?

By Linda Campbell (like the soup)

QNX BIOS for Intel Architecture

Ever since we announced QNX Fastboot for Intel Architecture I repeatedly get asked about how we make this work with the BIOS. Are we customizing the BIOS? Are we putting secret code before the BIOS and then bringing up the BIOS in a special way? Well there are two ways to clarify this:

1. THERE IS NO BIOS!

2. With QNX, you are now able to recieve a custom BIOS as a part of the Neutrino package.

Effectively, through our license agreement for the Z500 processor family (commonly known as the Atom), QNX has become a BIOS vendor. Albeit, we provide a dramatically customized (reduced) start up library that is device and application specific in line with our deeply embedded, high reliability focus.

As  a part of this, customers now have the option to engage the QNX services team to write their own custom start up (again, think BIOS) for their Intel Architecture devices. (Currently we’re only licensed to do this for the Z500 series processors, however we’re eager to start discussing new processors). This approach has the benefits of custom performance optimizations, i.e. it boots fast and can faciliate fast connectivity for things like CAN, Profinet, EtherCAT etc., and eliminates the BIOS from the BOM cost, the more units you ship the more you save.

So if you are thinking about the Intel Architecture for your next industrial or medical design but are frustrated with your current BIOS, please drop us a line to explore how we might resolve this.

You can test out our Fastboot IPL on the Kontron nanoETXexpress-SP module. Please download it here: http://community.qnx.com/sf/wiki/do/viewPage/projects.bsp/wiki/Bspdown_kontronnanosp

Kroy Zeviar

Genivi and automotive platforms

 

At Cebit, QNX, Microsoft and Genivi all revealed their visions for a common automotive reference platform that would cut costs, accelerate time to market, reduce costs and just make the world a better place. I won’t take the time to review each offering in detail as there has already been a fair bit of coverage from the media.   

 

 

In these articles, one thing struck me as particularly interesting. People are now identifying software as the single most important element in automotive systems going forward. I agree wholeheartedly. I spend a lot of my time lining up third party software vendors to meet the myriad requirements demanded by OEMs for upcoming model years.  It is no trivial task. Bluetooth connectivity, navigation, points of interest, remote update, internet radio, multi-media, device connectivity, speech recognition – the list goes on and on. Thankfully there are software companies that specialize in each of these areas.

 

The notion of a common automotive reference platform comes up a lot these days, even more so since the economy tanked and everyone has to do more with less. Ideally the vendors serving each of these very different areas would work cooperatively to shoulder the burden of integration and testing – a consortium of like minded industry players coming together to build something that could be used by all. A truly open, standards-based organization where the ultimate output would allow the automotive industry to choose exactly what functionality, features and vendors it wanted to work with. That’s very powerful stuff.

 

Genivi is a consortium that is being driven by a handful of automotive Tier ones and a couple of OEMs but only one silicon vendor and one software vendor. There is only one software vendor in the consortium today. My understanding of automotive requirements suggests that even a huge software giant couldn’t possibly hope to address everything needed, even if they had the next 50 years to get it done. I guess that’s where this community they talk about will have to help a lot.

 

I’m not suggesting that QNX CAR is the perfect solution either but at least it does encompass a rapidly growing number of software vendors and offers support for all the major automotive silicon choices out there today.  It is not a standard, per se, although the underlying operating system is POSIX compliant and brings the benefit of providing a standard API. It is open to pretty much everyone and its goal is to provide a set of pre-integrated, auto hardened technologies under a business model that promotes its use for prototyping and product development.

 

Now to be fair, I don’t actually know a lot about the details of how Genivi plans to roll out their platform. I’m not invited.

 

Romain

Crackberry gathering at Embedded World

 

I remember the days when we met in the lobby bar for drinks. 

Freescale i.mx based solutions for QNX from an expert!

A big warm welcome to Icytecture, a new venture co-founded by Boris Bobrov and Yossi Har-Nov, the latest members of the QNX Partner Network. Icytecture is a system integration house that specializes in i.mx and QNX based solutions. Their services include hardware and software design, mechanical design, integration, application development, and turnkey systems.

Yossi comes from Novtech, a company he founded that specialized in hardware and mechanical design. And Boris knows the i.mx inside and out from his time at Freescale. Boris saw the natural synergy between our rich i.mx BSP portfolio and Icytecture’s product roadmap of i.mx based hardware. His first platform is just coming out, it’s based on an i.mx31 and can be customized or ordered and deployed in its current form. Rumour has it that an i.mx35 based system is just around the corner.

And while they may be new to our ecosystem, they’re already doing the things that we consider best practices for a new partner – they spent a week in a QNX training course here in Kanata, they’re committed to writing and supporting their own BSP, and they introduced us to a new customer. (What more can you ask for?)

There is more…. they’ve agreed to post their BSP on Foundry 27 when its ready. We’re expecting to see it within the next few weeks. Life doesn’t get much better than this.

If you’d like to find out more about Icytecture, please send an email to boris@icytecture.com 

And if you’re a partner and you’d like to find out more about training, BSP development or Foundry 27, feel free to leave us a comment or send email to partners@qnx.com

By Linda Campbell

QNX CAR – the start of something big

When I got back from CES earlier this year I mentioned that one of my goals at the show was to share the QNX CAR vision. I saw a lot of nodding heads when I described a model where QNX and select members of its ecosystem could work together to pre-integrate our respective technologies. I saw a lot of eyes light up when I described an engagement model where automotive Tier oness and OEMs could leverage this pre-integration to get started on their designs.

 

On the 24^th of February, QNX formally launched the QNX CAR program. If you visit the new page (www.qnxcar.com) you can get lots more information on the program, how it works and what’s available for round one. You will also see an image of a bunch of lego blocks and a slick sports car. This graphic really distills the essence of the QNX CAR program.

 

Historically software and silicon vendors selling into automotive have worked loosely together and have left the task of integration to the Tier one. We have all been guilty of selling a bunch of lego that can be fit together somehow but have never provided the instructions on how to build the final product. QNX CAR changes that in several ways.

 

By working together to pre-integrate technology into the QNX CAR environment, QNX and its ecosystem are jumpstarting our collective customers’ designs. They can now bypass the initial integration work and focus on higher level, value added development. We are finally providing the instructions on how the lego fits together.

 

This alone would be pretty cool but we have also been working with our partners to sort out the initial licensing. Under QNX CAR, evaluation of 3^rd party technology no longer involves working with every company involved. Customers can engage directly with QNX to get their hands on all the bits and pieces involved. It’s simple, straight forward and easy. 

 

Add to this that the program is available at no charge and that QNX silicon partners are throwing hardware into the mix. For the first time ever, developers can get started on their prototyping just by being accepted to the program. That’s it. That’s all.

 

All this brings me to the point I raised in the title. This is just the beginning. On March 12^th the QNX CAR Foundry27 project will go live and participants will be able to access the first wave of third party technology along with QNX middleware.

 

You can be sure that this is only the start. We’ve been working with a longer list of partners around all sorts of technology. Check out the Foundry27 project on the 12^th but come back soon. You’ll see a growing list of technologies spanning 2D/3D nav, city view, remote over the air software updates, points of interest and more. Exciting times…

 

Romain

…where’s Xilinx Virtex 5 ML-507?..Here’s Xilinx…

(Warning PR Spoiler) This post does feel a little bit like reporting on a big screen drama.

FreeForm/PCI-104 module