Mr. Grant Courville reports

BLACKBERRY QNX AND TEXAS INSTRUMENTS COLLABORATE TO LAUNCH ONLINE TRAINING ACADEMY TO JUMP-START EMBEDDED SOFTWARE DEVELOPER INNOVATION

BlackBerry Ltd. and Texas Instruments have launched the QNX Academy for Functional Safety, a comprehensive on-line software developer enablement program designed to turbocharge software innovation efforts and derisk the product development process for safe and secure embedded systems.

Putting both BlackBerry QNX and Texas Instruments development tools, evaluation hardware, software and self-paced training at the fingertips of embedded software developers, the new training academy seeks to accelerate the development of systems that are safe and secure, and that offer real-time performance.

"Our collaboration with BlackBerry QNX will help embedded software developers accelerate their product development -- allowing them to not only learn, but innovate at their own pace," said Sameer Wasson, vice-president, processors, Texas Instruments. "High-performance processors, such as the TDA4VM, feature vision, sensor fusion and AI [artificial intelligence] technology can dramatically enhance perception and automation capabilities for a variety of systems. As software developers push the limits of what their systems can do, providing resources to help them more easily meet their functional safety requirements becomes even more critical."

"When it comes to developing safety-critical systems, such as industrial robots, AI vision systems or real-time industrial control systems, it is important that developers have a solid grounding in functional safety and can leverage products and expertise that are proven and trusted in the industry," said Grant Courville, vice-president, products and strategy, BlackBerry QNX. "With BlackBerry QNX and Texas Instruments collaborating, developers of safety systems get the best of all worlds -- the powerful TDA4VM Edge AI starter kit evaluation board from Texas Instruments, access to QNX development evaluation licences, and prebuilt demonstration software that includes support for camera, inertial measurement unit and lidar [light detection and ranging] sensors out of the box -- all coupled with training developed by some of the world's foremost functional safety experts from BlackBerry QNX."

Hosted on the TI developer zone, the QNX Academy for Functional Safety provides developers with the resources they need to get their safety-critical development projects on the right path, including the powerful TDA4VM Edge AI starter kit from Texas Instruments, access to evaluation licences of the QNX Hypervisor for Safety, the QNX software development platform, and user-friendly, self-paced training modules on topics such as safety culture, safety of the intended functionality, goal structuring notation and Bayesian belief networks, fault tree analysis, and anomaly detection. Demonstration hardware and software available through the academy will enable developers to load and learn right out of the box, and apply their learning with practical exercises, providing a foundational understanding about safety-critical development. Additionally, the written and video training content use real-world examples to help developers at every stage of their project.

About BlackBerry Ltd.

BlackBerry provides intelligent security software and services to enterprises and governments around the world. The company secures more than 500 million endpoints, including 215 million vehicles. Based in Waterloo, Ont., the company leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver innovative solutions in the areas of cybersecurity, safety and data privacy solutions, and is a leader in the areas of endpoint security, endpoint management, encryption and embedded systems. BlackBerry's vision is clear -- to secure a connected future you can trust.