BlackBerry has announced that QNX OS for Safety 2.2 will be certified to Safety Integrity Level (SIL) 4, the highest level in the EN 50125 safety standard established by the European Electrotechnical Committee for Standardization (CENELEC).
QNX OS for Safety is a pre-certified microkernel operating system to support critical digital transportation systems development. Running on both Arm and x86 processors, it provides safety-certified resource managers, applications, and qualified C and C++ toolchains to support app development. The operating system is pre-certified with a list of industrial standard organizations; the company provides the full list on its product website.
Developing on a pre-certified operating system saves time and cost for critical infrastructure software development by removing the safety certification process from the development process. With it, developers can focus on the applications as opposed to the full system stack.
With the latest certification, BlackBerry is gunning for the railway logistics and transportation industry, which saw a massive boom during the COVID-19 pandemic as online orders soared. The need for faster, reliable transportation was further fuelled by supply chain constraints; customers needed to receive materials from suppliers as quickly as possible to continue growth.
A number of railway systems developers have adopted BlackBerry’s QNX OS for Safety, including sTraffic in South Korea and Infraestruturas de Portugal in Portugal.