Embedded Computing Design October 2011 : Page 22Strategies | Automotive infotainment Silicon | Microcontrollers ECD: What are some of the key innovations both companies offer to simplify the design process for auto engineers? And how do you help the general application development community keep cars fresh with new applications? GRYC: For auto engineers, it’s about creating a platform that has all the key software technologies integrated into it. In essence, we give them an out-of-the-box infotainment system that has the pieces they need – Operating System (OS) platform, multimedia engine, graph-ics frameworks, networking stacks, and so on – to get their systems set up quickly. For the application developer community, it’s about providing support for HTML5, Adobe AIR, and other standards so that developers have the flexibility to apply their expertise to automotive systems, regardless of the application or the auto manufacturer for which the applica-tion is designed. For example, because the BlackBerry PlayBook is based on the QNX Neutrino OS, developers who create applications for the BlackBerry PlayBook could have a natural migration path between application development on the PlayBook and automotive systems based on QNX Neutrino. SYKES: It is also important to provide scalable development solutions to the Figure 2 | Freescale’s i.MX 6 series of single-, dual-, and quad-core processors enable next-generation automotive infotainment with a powerful, scalable platform for multimedia and display applications. customer. While some chipmakers focus their solutions on a particular segment of the infotainment market, the newest i.MX 6 family of application processors can cover the entire range of solutions from entry to high end while maintain-ing software compatibility (see Figure 2). The entire family is based on standard ARM processors in single and multicore configurations and shares common foot-prints and pin configurations. Hardware can be designed without worrying if more or less performance will be needed later. [Figure 2 | Freescale’s i.MX 6 series of single-, dual-, and quad-core processors enable next-generation automotive infotainment with a powerful, scalable platform for multimedia and display applications.] environments, all of which have a serious appetite for CPU cycles. Multicore addresses this demand for greater processing power by allowing multiple applications to run in parallel. For example, in a multimedia head unit, you could dedicate one core to running a compute-intensive process such as an HTML5 browser and use the other cores to run the remaining processes. Or you could run in full Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) mode and allow any process to run on any available core. From a software perspective, the QNX Neutrino RTOS makes multicore dead simple. Because QNX Neutrino employs a true microkernel architecture, only the OS kernel needs SMP awareness and supporting logic. Applications, drivers, networking stacks, and other multithreaded processes can automatically take advan-tage of multiple cores without having to be rewritten or redesigned because the kernel handles the details of scheduling threads on each core. Moreover, our visualization tools can analyze how the multicore system behaves as a whole. This approach offers deeper insight into the complex system interactions typical of multicore designs and allows developers to focus their efforts on areas that yield the greatest increase in parallelism and performance. www.embedded-computing.com • Open Frame Design • Fanless • ARM9 400MHz CPU • Real Time Clock • 4 Serial Ports & SPI • I2S Audio I/O Port • Up to 256MB RAM • Up to 1GB NAND Flash • 10/100 BaseT Ethernet • GPIO, A/D, Timers & PWM • 2 x USB 2.0 Host/OTG ports • 2 x SD/MMC Flash Card Interface • Wide Input Voltage of 12 to 26 Vdc. • Linux with Eclipse IDE or WinCE 6.0 • WVGA (800 x 480) 7” LCD with Touch • Prices start at $550.00! T he PPC-E7+ is a Compact Panel PC based on a 400 M + z ARM9 processor with the following features: Prior to hardware development, the soft-ware development process can start with Freescale’s affordable automotive-focused reference platforms that enable key system functions, offer expandability to support new functions, and include the software base that allows the customer to start devel-opment right away. ECD: What has changed in automotive infotainment that makes multicore CPU architectures so attractive to developers today, and how do Freescale and QNX Software Systems take advantage of these architectures? GRYC: Simply put, there’s a lot more going into cars, from video codecs to 3D navigation applications to high-level languages with virtualized execution 2.6 KERNEL For more info visit: www.emacinc.com/panel_pc/ppc_e7.htm Since 1985 OVER 25 YEARS OF SINGLE BOARD SOLUTIONS E QUIPMENT M ONITOR A ND C ONTROL Phone: (618) 529-4525 · Fax: (618) 457-0110 · Web: www.emacinc.com 22 | October 2011 Embedded Computing Design EMAC, Inc. |
