When system failure is not an option:
QNX helps Yashio Electric compress development time while delivering reliable power supply monitoring

The Customer
Yashio Electric is a leading manufacturer of supply monitoring systems for power companies throughout Japan. Their application is critical to the power industry, monitoring power supply in hydroelectric plants, and monitoring for problems in power lines.

The Challenge
When Yashio needed a reliable operating system for their power administration product, they chose QNX Neutrino RTOS – because when providing critical control systems for power stations and substations, reliability cannot be compromised. Some of the challenges they knew they would face while developing the system included runtime license costs, middleware integration issues and associated costs, along with a tight timeline. They had a limit on the size of kernel used to run their software. And with a limited timeline for development, they needed the ability for team members to design concurrently.

The QNX Advantage
The choice of QNX Neutrino was a logical one, with its microkernel architecture, support for IO drivers, and the ability to speed development through features like concurrent design, instant bug isolation, providing high code reuse, and rapid develop-test cycles. It also provided Japanese support, and realtime performance – two features that were essential to their power industry customers in Japan.

In addition to the low cost and reliability of QNX Neutrino, other features of interest to Yashio were fault-tolerance support, realtime performance, GUI development scalability, connectivity to existing systems such as A/D, DIO, Ethernet, VME bus, HDD, 3.5FD devices.

The Result
“For five years now, we have used QNX as our standard for supply monitoring systems, because of its real time performance, its robustness and its fault-tolerance support, and we knew as we upgrade to future versions of QNX Neutrino we would be assured an easy-migration and the same or better reliability results we received from the current version,\" said Takeshi Anzai, Engineering Division Manager of Yashio Electric.