Freescale Semiconductor and Wind River Systems, Inc. have announced the availability of the Wind River(R) Platform for Automotive Devices Product Evaluation and demonstration kit, which represents the company’s first pre-integrated solution reference for the automotive telematics/infotainment industry. The integrated Wind River partner demonstration includes a working car infotainment solution running on the Freescale Media5200. The software portion of the evaluation kit is comprised of the Wind River Platform for Automotive Devices software, Datalight’s FlashFX(R) Pro and Reliance(TM) flash file system, and Tilcon’s graphics engine and library. Automotive OEMs can leverage the pre-integrated software technologies to jump-start their next project and speed time-to-market. This evaluation kit provides Automotive OEMs with 25% – 60% of the code they would need to develop an infotainment device.
Device software engineers are increasingly looking towards software platforms and pre-integrated solutions to help implement devices faster, better, at lower cost, and more reliably. The Wind River partner demonstration supports cutting-edge technologies such as OpenGL and 3D navigation. It offers industry standards support, advanced automotive connectivity, and extensive partner technologies, as well as Wind River(R) Workbench, an integrated development suite based on the Eclipse framework.
Software is the deciding factor in many, perhaps most, automotive buy decisions today. Infotainment, advanced automotive connectivity, body electronics, and under-the-hood monitoring and control systems account for more than 40 percent of a car’s cost. This shift is changing how automotive manufacturers do business by requiring them to think about how to license, support, and upgrade the complex software packages now essential to the success of their products.
Automotive manufacturers can leverage the quality and reliability of the reference solution from Wind River and Freescale to instantly stabilize their software development projects by addressing the challenges and mounting complexities associated with software innovation. With this solution, automotive manufacturers can reduce the in-house development of lower-end, infrastructure technologies and focus valuable resources on application development that differentiates their product offerings in the market.
To ensure a complete range of integrated technologies, Wind River has established the DSO industry’s widest-ranging partner ecosystem, joining forces with leading hardware and software providers to address such technologies as speech recognition and text-to-speech, Java, advanced graphics capabilities, Bluetooth, and IEEE 1394. A Wind River Platform for Automotive Devices Product Evaluation and Integrated Application Demonstration from Tilcon and Datalight are included in the Freescale Media5200 development platform. Additional providers of important technologies for Automotive Devices including ALT Software, 3DVU, 3Soft, Conversay, Gracenote, and Encirq are working on support for the Freescale Media5200 and Wind River’s Platform for Automotive Devices.
“Wind River helps support the life-cycle challenge of device software development all the way from requirements to support,” said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer, Wind River. “An automotive system solution is only as strong as its weakest link. This integrated combination of the Freescale Media5200 HW, Wind River Platform for Automotive Devices and additional required software components provides an extensive, commercial grade, foundation for optimized development of Telematics and Infotainment devices.”
“We are excited to offer automotive infotainment customers a fully integrated software solution for the Freescale Media5200 development platform,” said Anand Ramamoorthy, general manager of Freescale’s infotainment, multimedia and telematics business. “Our collaboration with Wind River and other software partners gives customers the ability to simplify their product development process and add additional features available from Freescale and Wind River.”
Freescale’s Media5200 Development System provides Automotive Tier 1 manufacturers and OEMs with an excellent platform for rapid development of new multimedia and Infotainment product applications and solutions. At the heart of the Media5200 Development System is the MPC5200B which contains a PowerPC(R) core, a cost-effective high-performance processor tailored specifically to in-vehicle infotainment and telematics systems.
Wind River will showcase the new solution with Freescale Semiconductor at Telematics Update Detroit 2006, May 23-24, 2006, the leading business conference on automotive telematics.
Wind River is the global leader in device software optimization (DSO). Wind River enables companies to develop, run and manage device software faster, better, at lower cost and more reliably. Wind River platforms are pre- integrated, fully standardized enterprise-wide development solutions. They reduce effort, cost and risk and optimize quality and reliability at all phases of the device software development process from concept to deployed product.
Freescale Semiconductor Inc. is a global leader in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors for the automotive, consumer, industrial, networking and wireless markets. Freescale became a publicly traded company in July 2004. The company is based in Austin, Texas, and has design, research and development, manufacturing or sales operations in more than 30 countries. Freescale, a member of the S&P 500(R), is one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies with 2005 sales of $5.8 billion (USD). For more information about Freescale, visit www.freescale.com.
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