HOUSTON and OTTAWA, (April 3, 2006) - Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN) and QNX Software Systems today announced their collaboration to enhance the development of digital audio and video applications for the embedded market, including QNX's support for TI's DaVinciTM technology. The combination of TI's technology and the realtime performance and reliability of the QNX® Neutrino® RTOS will enhance the development and integration of digital audio and video for embedded products in a variety of markets, including automotive infotainment, consumer electronics, in-flight entertainment, industrial automation, and medical technology.TI's DaVinci technology is the industry's first platform to enable digital audio, video and multimedia innovation without requiring extensive codec expertise. DaVinci technology-based products save developers time and money by allowing them to build upon existing, production-tested software components optimized for digital audio, video and multimedia.
To maximize the performance of media-rich applications running on DaVinci technology-based TMS320DM644x processors, QNX will support an interface layer between the ARM and the DSP cores, based on TI's DSP/BIOS® LINK technology. QNX's multimedia solutions leverage the power of the DSP and automatically pass along this performance benefit to higher-level multimedia applications. By offloading complex media processing to the DSP, this approach frees up the ARM core to perform other functions, giving designers greater design flexibility and allowing them to build more value-added features into their DaVinci-based products. The QNX design also promotes maximum reliability. If an application fails on the ARM core, the QNX Neutrino RTOS will automatically contain the problem and the application can be automatically restarted, without affecting other software. This brings automotive-grade reliability to consumer-class devices.
"As video is increasingly added to fault-tolerant systems, including medical devices, space stations, automobiles, traffic and flight control, customers require a simplified digital video solution combined with a reliable operating system. Together, TI's DaVinci technology and the QNX Neutrino RTOS provide the performance, reliability, and scalability that is exactly what these markets need," said Huy Pham, system-on-chip platform marketing, TI.
"QNX offers the only fault-tolerant microkernel RTOS for the embedded industry's most rugged computing platforms, from the International Space Station to the automobile," said Andrew Poliak, automotive segment manager, QNX Software Systems. "We are always looking for opportunities to support hardware innovation that can speed the emergence of new markets and technologies in the embedded world, and we are proud to work together with TI to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge digital video and multimedia applications."
As part of this collaborative relationship, QNX will release a board support package (BSP) designed to accelerate development of embedded video applications based on the DM644x. The BSP will be available in Q3 2006.