NVDA on BB partnership
Question: Can you talk more about your partnership with Blackberry and the definition of functional safety?
Huang: In order to achieve functional safety, we have to architect the entire system, from the architecture of our chip, to the design of our chip, to the system software, and then of course the OS. For the OS we chose QNX, which is Blackberry. Blackberry bought QNX. QNX is the first OS that’s certified for functional safety, ASIL D level, ISO 26262. It’s a very complicated set of things. It has to do with how they isolate multiple running processes inside the OS. QNX is functional safe.
TTTech is a company in Geneva. They’ve been in the automotive industry a very long time. They have a middleware, called a framework, that’s time triggered, not event triggered. All of our computers here are event triggered. Time triggered is like a clock. Every operation, every application, can have this much time. Then it has to give up the time, give up the process to another application. It has this much time. It’s a real time system, a framework for applications. Combined with QNX and all of our software that makes for the functional safety architecture.
Question: Is that an open platform?
Huang: Yes, it’s an open platform. People are using it now. All of our developers are using it. Nvidia’s Drive, the whole platform, has Xavier on the bottom. It has our Drive OS inside. It has QNX and TT Tech’s technology. Then there’s Drive Works, which is basically our multimedia and AI layer. Then there’s Drive AV, our self-driving car applications. All of this is tested with Autosim. It’s so complicated.
Self-driving cars are so complicated. That’s why we have several thousand engineers working on it. We have more engineers working on self-driving cars, developing all this end-to-end system, than any company in the world today, I believe. And we have 320 partners, from startups to sensor companies to tier ones to OEMs – buses, trucks, cars. |
