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Linux drives automotive infotainment

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team May 21, 2008

Wind River Linux Platform for Infotainment allows developers, suppliers and manufacturers to bring to market new, compelling products faster and at a much lower cost.

Wind River Systems has released an infotainment platform based on an automotive-optimised commercial Linux that will significantly accelerate time to market of innovative applications for the in-vehicle infotainment segment of the automotive industry.

In recent years, the automotive industry has faced integration and interoperability challenges with consumer electronics technologies.

The challenges are largely due to mismatched development cycles, dramatic increases in platform development costs and a pressing need to speed platform innovation to help differentiate the entire vehicle.

Manufacturers and suppliers have found that traditional proprietary approaches to these challenges lack the flexibility to help create true differentiation.

In addition, these approaches constrict business models, while Linux kernel-centric approaches don't address time to market issues or development costs.

Through Wind River Linux Platform for Infotainment, developers, suppliers and manufacturers will be better positioned to bring to market new, compelling products faster and at a much lower cost.

Wind River Linux Platform for Infotainment will be optimised for the Intel Atom processor and will offer pre-integration with many third-party networking and multimedia applications.

These applications include speech-recognition and speech-to-text technologies by Nuance Communications; Bluetooth and advanced echo-cancellation and noise reduction solutions by Parrot; music management and automatic playlisting technologies by Gracenote; multimedia networking solutions by SMSC; and DVD playback by Corel's LinDVD.

"Wind River is taking the daunting complexity out of the in-vehicle device market by providing a single, integrated development environment that leverages contributions from adjacent industries and will be pre-integrated with a comprehensive ecosystem of partner technologies", said Vincent Rerolle, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Linux Product Division at Wind River.

Wind River Linux Platform for Infotainment will deliver connectivity with popular CE devices such as the iPod, as well as support for rich 3D graphics now common in navigation systems and support for a wide range of consumer electronics, video and audio standards.

It provides the framework for how the system performs during changes to vehicle and device power state.

It offers interoperability with Controller Area Network (CAN), a popular bus for in-vehicle communications and industrial automation applications and Media-Oriented Systems Transport (MOST), the standard for automotive multimedia networks.