Embedded operating systems developer QNX Software Systems has introduced an automotive application development framework called QNX CAR that leverages technology from QNX and suppliers in its ecosystem to speed automakers’ time to market.
Automotive product marketing manager Andy Gryc said QNX CAR offers preassembled reference implementations that allow customers to skip integration and work immediately on product development and differentiation.
The first two implementations are a digital instrument cluster and a multi-node infotainment system. They include integrations with consumer devices, voice, Bluetooth, music management, Internet radio, and other third-party technologies.
Gryc said the integration reduces the upfront engineering needed to initiate a prototyping program, both for OEMs proving out ideas in a lab and for tier one suppliers competing for their next customer win. The firm plans to implementations for other applications.
QNX CAR should “eliminate the time-consuming bottleneck” of silicon and software integration, according to Gryc. “QNX CAR reduces risk by providing customers with access to software technologies and engineering expertise during prototyping, but applying charges only to those projects that go into production. As a result, tier one suppliers and OEMs can reduce engineering costs and deployment risks, while leveraging the time-to-market advantage of pre-integrated technologies.”
QNX CAR includes a developer portal that provides source code to QNX products, technical resources, forums, and the ability to track new features in real time. The framework will support ARM, Power, SH, and x86 silicon architectures provided by vendors including Freescale, Renesas, Nvidia, Fujitsu, and Intel.
QNX also introduced Neutrino RTOS 6.4.1 and Momentics Tool Suite 6.4.1. The new Neutrino version offers a standards-based composition manager based on Khronos Group's OpenKODE, an open standard that increases the code portability of graphics applications. The composition manager lets developers layer multiple human machine interface (HMI) technologies such as a web browser, 3D graphics, and Adobe Flash Lite, on the same physical display. The composition manager helps to ensure clean separation between graphics applications, so that new applications will not affect the performance of existing programs.
Neutrino 6.4.1 also adds a modular, embeddable web browser based on the Webkit engine; support for ARM’s Cortex-A8 processor, and floating-point unit (FPU) support for the signal processing engine in Freescale PowerPC e500 processor cores.
The Momentics Tool Suite includes new command-line tools (GCC 4.3), GCC "Mudflap" tool visualization for detecting C/C++ runtime errors that arise from invalid pointer operations, and support for the Eclipse platform 3.4 and the Eclipse CDT 5.0.x.