|
Software drivers
|
01/04/2007
|
| |
As automotive operational and entertainment systems have developed from a few in-dash components to individual multimedia clusters for the driver and each passenger, the embedded software burden has expanded dramatically. Steve Snook reports
The relationship between our world inside the car and the wider world outside it has never been closer. In particular, there is now a demand for a seamless integration between the communications, telematics and infotainment systems we enjoy at home, at work and while on the move. What is clear, however, is that no great breakthroughs will be achieved without more standardised operating system (OS) software.
Commercial telematics customers require software that not only provides details of the whereabouts of vehicles, but also the ability to take a live traffic information feed, allowing strategic deployment of vehicles to a delivery or collection point, along with predictive timing schedules. But having achieved that level of control over their fleet of vehicles, operators then require that all gathered data – vehicle running times and mileage, driver hours, meal breaks or overnight stops, fuel economy and whatever else might be deduced form the management software – can be downloaded and fed into other software packages. And private motorists are no less demanding.
“From synchronised content to personalised user experiences and simultaneous multiple user options, each year consumers are expecting more out of the in-vehicle entertainment experience,” says Veerender Kaul, research manager, advanced automotive technologies at Frost & Sullivan. “As the needs of the consumer have become more complex, the automotive industry is searching for an integrated multimedia solution.”
The relationship between the consumer electronics industry and automotive was demonstrated clearly in January when Microsoft and Ford announced the results of their latest collaboration – Ford Sync – simultaneously at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Delegates in Las Vegas were even treated to an on-stage discussion between Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Mark Fields, the president of the Americas for Ford.
As Gates put it: “Our ambition is to give you connected experiences 24 hours a day. We admit that when you’re sleeping we haven’t quite figured out what we’re going to do for you there, but the rest of the time, the minute you get in the kitchen and look at that refrigerator, pick up your phone, hear the alarm clock tell you about the traffic; whatever it is, we want you to have the information you’re interested in.
“And in thinking about that broadly, one area comes up that clearly demands special work, and that is thinking about connecting to the car. Now, the kind of entertainment you want in the car is the same great things that you have everywhere else.
“But the car is special. You’ve got to have things that are simple. If you want to deliver to the driver you have to think about incredibly simple commands, safe ways to get that driver involved. A lot of people spend over an hour and a half in their car every day, so they want it to fit, they want to get at their information and their content.”
The first version of Windows Automotive was designed by Microsoft teams in Redmond and Tokyo in 1998. Now in version 5.0, it powers devices in cars from BMW, Citroen, DaimlerChrysler, Fiat, Honda, Hyundai, Toyota, Volvo and Ford. Following the tie-in with Fiat announced during 2006, Microsoft clearly sees the Ford deal as a big step towards more widespread adoption of its operating systems in the vehicle.
“Ford and Microsoft share vision for a future where drivers are safely connected to the people, information and entertainment they care about while they are on the road,” said Gates. “Built on Microsoft Auto technology, Ford Sync delivers an in-car system that is an important step toward achieving this vision. Using software that bridges the automotive and consumer electronics industries, Sync will help revolutionise the driving experience by providing a simple system that intelligently connects mobile phones, music players and more.”
Ford Sync is a factory-installed communications and entertainment system. The Ford-exclusive technology based on Microsoft Auto software and the Continental Automotive Systems telematics gateway allows consumers to bring into their vehicle nearly any mobile phone or digital media player and operate it using voice commands or the vehicle’s steering wheel or radio controls. Ford Sync uses a 400MHz version of Freescale Semiconductor’s i.MX31 multimedia applications processor.
Ford’s Mark Fields was just as excited as Bill Gates at the CES launch: “What Sync does is integrate all of the electronic devices that are in your pockets when you get in your car – cell phones, Zunes, iPods – right into the vehicle, and seamlessly. It means never having to download your phone book ever again. It downloads every personal setting, like personalised ringtones and three-way calling, right through the vehicle’s audio system.
“Drivers can place and receive calls, and also text messages, through the audio system. They can even maintain a phone conversation while entering or exiting a vehicle. And Sync also allows users to have text messages read aloud to them through text-to-speech technology, which even translates internet slang like LOL and expressions such as smiley faces.
“Most exciting, it has the ability to be a full entertainment platform, as it accepts nearly all portable music players and most USB storage devices and flash and Zip drives. Through its voice recognition software it can even create personalised playlists with a simple voice command. Because it’s fully upgradeable, owners will never have to worry about whether their car is compatible with the latest phone or music player.
“Sync is the kind of feature that in the past we would have introduced on luxury cars, but we’re going to roll it out quickly and affordably, because its market potential from our perspective is absolutely huge. It is going to be available on a dozen Ford products this year.”
System partner Continental Automotive Systems announced a global strategic alliance with Microsoft to integrate the Microsoft Auto software into its next generation telematics gateway at the beginning of this year. The Ford Sync system is the first introduction but Continental sees great opportunities for similar systems.
“Continental is changing the way drivers access content inside their car,” says Kieran O’Sullivan, senior vice president of the company’s telematics business unit. “Continental and Microsoft are developing products that will help their automotive customers speed their time to market when introducing innovative consumer electronic technologies in future vehicle platforms.”
The Microsoft Auto platform includes a complete hardware reference design that supports the i.MX31 processor. Berardino Baratta, general manager of the Multimedia Applications Division at Freescale, says: “With its highly efficient memory system, the i.MX31 processor is designed to provide ample processing power to run the Microsoft operating system, handle audio signal processing for hands-free phone operation and perform all of the voice recognition functionality in the Sync system.”
Microsoft’s business model is essentially direct licensing that allows automotive OEMs to standardise on a software platform with a standardised hardware reference specification. This allows them to multisource their hardware to drive down costs.
“A standardised OS is by definition compatible and supportable across a wide range of hardware,” says Mark Spain, director of Microsoft’s automotive business unit. “By introducing elements of this model to the automotive industry we are driving a horizontally integrated model which is proven to provide multiple benefits associated with choice, cost and options.
“Clearly there are alternative software platforms in the in-vehicle telematics and entertainment space. We believe having choice and options is good for the industry. Having said that, from a supplier perspective the acquisition of QNX by one of the hardware partners [Harman International, in 2004] actually conflicts with the horizontal model. You now have a vertically integrated model where you have a hardware company owning the platform company driving a completely vertically controlled offering to the industry. We believe the model fundamentally doesn’t benefit the industry overall and that the aggregate value of the horizontal model will ultimately win.”
Blue&Me is the Fiat product name for its infotainment product powered by Windows Mobile for Automotive (the third of Microsoft’s automotive software products, the others being Windows Automotive 5.0 and Microsoft Auto). Microsoft worked with Fiat for a couple of years to bring the technology to market and Fiat launched the system at the 2006 Geneva show, apparently with a limited exclusivity agreement for Europe. Ford is believed to have a similar short-term exclusivity agreement for Sync in North America.
“We anticipate that each OEM will identify their own names for products to be used in their vehicles in the future,” says Spain. “We will continue to innovate on our Windows Mobile for Automotive and Windows Automotive platforms to meet the needs of the industry. While OEMs will focus on slightly varied case scenarios, the overall trend will be to work with variations of the core platforms.
“The time to market required by the next OEMs will be much shorter because both OEMs and their choice of suppliers will be able to leverage the investments Microsoft has made in standardising technical references, hardware and software specifications. This will help OEMs and their suppliers define their experiences, expose their technical engineering interfaces on the vehicle and rapidly apply these investments to their car.”
Microsoft has developed a second generation of the Blue&Me platform with Fiat. Since its launch in 2006, Blue&Me has been requested by 20% of all Fiat, Alfa Romeo and Lancia model buyers, and the product won the Telematics Update award for the best telematics solution of the year in May 2006.
Now, Blue&Me Nav – launched with the Fiat Bravo last month – builds on the original platform to offer a “simple and intuitive graphical voice controlled navigation system, and a more easily accessible USB port”. The platform will gradually be extended to other new Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and light commercial vehicles.
Blue&Me Nav will also support additional telematics services. This year the first series of services will be launched in Italy, then introduced to other major European markets. These services will include SOS, information and insurance tracking. Further enhancements under development include business/fleet customer services, proactive car maintenance and navigation without pre-loaded maps. All these are being developed in partnership with Telecom Italia.
So does the future belong to Microsoft? Not surprisingly, not everyone thinks so. John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer of Wind River, oversees the company’s product planning and management. Writing on the company’s website last October (see panel) he reported on discussions he was having with software and electronics specialists in the auto business, and specifically on which OS will dominate automotive infotainment.
Bruggeman leans towards a Linux-based future: “Linux has always been suspect when it comes to automotive applications. The general belief was that safety-critical automotive applications required a deterministic, real-time operating system. Linux just didn’t cut it for telematics or under-the-hood applications and OEMs relied on proprietary OS companies for their solutions.
“Some of that belief is grounded in fact. Consequently, Linux adoption in automotive has moved at a snail’s pace. But I believe, moving forward, Linux adoption in the automotive industry will happen quickly, dramatically, and in ways we never expected. We are now at a ‘tipping point’, the point at which several key drivers align to make the uncommon common.”
In support of Bruggeman’s view, Motorola’s director of technology, William Maggs, told the Freescale Technology Forum last July: “Mobile Linux will converge into the world’s largest mobile software platform over the next several years, overtaking Symbian, BREW and Microsoft. With our mobile phones becoming the key item of personal technology, albeit in a variety of forms and formats, that shift – if it happens – will be significant.”
Looking elsewhere
In February, QNX Software Systems – not content to leave all the hype to Microsoft – demonstrated a multimedia ‘middleware’ product that it claims “revolutionises not only how automakers integrate multimedia solutions in the car, but how users experience their favourite music, movies, or other digital media while on the road”.
The QNX Multimedia Solution is based on the company’s established Neutrino real-time operating system (RTOS). As a microkernel-based OS, QNX Neutrino is based on the idea of running most of the OS in the form of a number of small tasks, known as servers. This differs from the more traditional monolithic kernel, in which the operating system is a single very large program comprised of a huge number of ‘parts’ with special abilities. The use of a microkernel allows developers to turn off any functionality they do not require without having to change the OS itself. Neutrino is still a European leader in this sector.
The Multimedia Solution from QNX combines a fully featured embeddable media player and supporting multimedia software that simplifies the design process and enables automakers and Tier One suppliers to build ‘next-generation’ digital infotainment platforms. System designers can easily take advantage of its intelligent connectivity, full customisation, and automotive-grade control, says QNX chief executive Dan Dodge.
“QNX has already established itself as the undisputed leader in operating system technology for in-car telematics and infotainment. Now, by taking the insight gained from helping customers create in-cab systems for more than 180 vehicle models worldwide, we are introducing value-added middleware that tackles the phenomenal design challenges of automotive suppliers. QNX is moving up the stack, with middleware products that not only cut time to market but also offer unmatched design flexibility and unique user experiences.
“For companies looking to quickly bring advanced digital media platforms to the automotive market, the suite of device drivers, encoders/decoders, databases, and configurable HMIs available in the QNX Multimedia Solution drastically reduces development cycles and integration phases.
“The QNX Multimedia Solution includes all of the expected features of a digital media player, including both audio and video playback and audio record features. Moreover, it can extend the functionality of an in-dash stereo by harnessing the intelligence of iPods, PlaysForSure media players, and other connected devices.”
To personalise the user experience, the QNX Multimedia Solution can identify any CD, DVD, USB flash disk, or audio/video stream and automatically synchronise the content on that media source with a customisable, automotive-hardened database. This feature lets users generate playlists that extend across multiple media sources.
It can also support content recording in a variety of scenarios. For instance, content from one media source can be ripped to a car’s hard drive while users listen to content from another source. Moreover, users can simultaneously play and record content from the same medium.
The technology also supports multiple independent users, with multiple device types, and with multiple playback and record paths. For instance, front passengers can listen to music while rear-seat passengers watch a DVD. The QNX Multimedia Solution also supports advanced features such as time shifting, trick play (fast forward) and multi-view content presentation (shared screen).
QNX demonstrated the system in Europe for the first time at the Embedded World show in Nürnberg in February, showing two custom media players on multiple embedded platforms: Freescale PowerPC, Renesas Sequoia, and Texas Instruments DaVinci. The technology was also shown at last October’s Convergence show in Detroit.
At Convergence, Renesas Technology America announced that its Sequoia platform, which is based on the Euclid telematics chip (SH7397), would be supported by a QNX board support package. That package, consisting of the Neutrino RTOS and software drivers, was available at the end of 2006.
“With this RTOS and its driver support on the Sequoia platform, automotive electronics companies will be able to integrate middleware and develop software applications in a fully integrated development environment,” says Paul Sykes, marketing manager, automotive business of Renesas Technology America. “This will enable them to create and debug code more efficiently and thus achieve a faster time to market.”
Andrew Poliak, automotive business manager at QNX, says: “Our board support package for the Sequoia platform not only allows developers to leverage the rich multimedia capabilities and reliability of the Neutrino RTOS, but also allows them to enjoy the productivity advantages of the QNX Momentics development suite.”
Green Hills Software introduced its Platform for Automotive Systems in 2005, and in 2006 the company announced that its Integrity and velOSity royalty-free real-time operating systems – both integral elements of the automotive platform – had been certified by TÜV to Safety Integrity Level 3 (SIL3) of the IEC 61508 safety standard. SIL3 is the highest assurance level achievable for an individual software component.
The Integrity mid-range real-time kernel is aimed at applications running on microprocessors without a memory management unit (MMU), yet still requiring a wide range of device drivers, board support packages, networking, file system and other middleware support. Applications include low and mid-range head units, navigation units and hands-free car kits. Integrity is also being used in digital infotainment platforms that integrate a variety of functions into a single head unit, including audio playback and compression/encoding, video, navigation, wireless networking, telematics, and speech synthesis and recognition. Integrity 10, the latest release, is integrated with version 5 of the company’s Multi integrated development environment.
“Automotive suppliers and OEMs face growing challenges as the features, complexities and consumer expectations of vehicle electronics reach unmanageable levels,” says Dan Mender, director of business development at Green Hills Software.
Last year Green Hills added the µ-velOSity royalty-free real-time microkernel, new CAN driver software, and support for next-generation office-in-the-car systems to its Platform for Automotive.
“µ-velOSity is the latest addition to our Universal Operating System,” says Mender. “With a ROM footprint as small as 1,600 bytes, RAM footprint as small as 1,000 bytes, service call times as low as 30 cycles, and time to first thread execution [boot time] as low as 1,500 cycles, it is ideal for real-time, performance-critical, resource-constrained automotive electronic devices, many of which lack off-chip memory, that can be found within in-car head units, handsets, dashboards and body electronics. Because of µ-velOSity’s API compatibility with velOSity and Integrity, it can be the low end in the platform architecture for these types of devices.
“Added to velOSity’s and Integrity’s shared ecosystem of automotive drivers and middleware are new FlexCAN drivers suitable for use on a variety of microcontrollers, including the PowerPC 5500, ColdFire 5200 and MAC7100 families from Freescale Semiconductor.”
Green Hills’ Padded Cell technology can be used to implement in-car office functionality securely and reliably, says Mender. “Instant-on, real-time multimedia applications may run directly on Integrity, while one or more instances of Windows or Linux, with their associated HMI and office applications, can run – under the control of our virtualisation technology, Padded Cell – all on a single automotive-grade PC. This saves cost, weight, power and size over the alternative of using two separate computers, one for the head unit and one for the back-seat office environment.”
Forward motion
Although Sync puts Ford at the front of automotive connectivity, the market is not standing still, says Dr K Prasad Venkatesh, group and technical leader with Ford’s Infotronics Research and Advanced Engineering department.
“The automotive user experience, especially as it relates to information services and entertainment, is in a state of rapid metamorphosis,” says Prasad. “Today’s user experience is being defined by personalised digital content and information – anywhere, anytime. We are speaking to the most connected and smartest consumers out there. With Sync as the foundation as we go forward, the possibilities for future user experiences is limitless.”
In an interview after the launch of Blue&Me last year, Mark Spain at Microsoft gave some indication of likely near-term developments.
“The OEMs we are working with realise there are opportunities in areas such as remote vehicle diagnostics and other services that will extend value to their customers, their dealers and to their engineering processes as well,” Spain told analyst Frost & Sullivan. “They are very enthusiastic about our platform’s ability to host solutions that address these opportunities. So I think it’s fair to assume those types of capabilities, solutions and applications will, in fact, be made available on the Windows Mobile for Automotive platform.
“From a technical perspective, our current platform has the hardware and software capabilities to support these applications. The outstanding issues are the business model and the logistics associated with it. At present, we are engaged with a large number of OEMs who are intent on leveraging the platform for a number of traditional telematics scenarios. These primarily deliver value to the driver such as safety and security features, for example automatic crash notification, remote doorunlock and e-call. Other scenarios of particular interest to automotive OEMs are more specifically focused on diagnostics type of applications.”
Toyota goes it alone
Car navigation system manufacturers currently deliver products running on the Windows Automotive OS from Microsoft, or a proprietary OS based on a set of specifications called uITRON. uITRON is not itself an OS, but a set of specifications for a small-scale industrial real time operating system. Toyota feels the only way to reduce duplicated software development load among various corporations, along with cost, is to develop a single OS. Kazuhiko Hayashi, general manager of the electronics engineering division of the Vehicle Engineering Group at Toyota, reportedly told Asian journalists last year the company decided to develop its own OS for information systems because: “We wanted to take control of the direction of OS development.”
It believes keeping to a Toyota-developed OS for both the information and control systems will assure safety, clarify the costs of software development for electronic control units and promote application software reuse. The goal is to make it simpler to implement new applications combining information and control functions.
A single control systems OS – the proprietary OSEK/VDX OS – is now being deployed in some Toyota commercial vehicles, and in mid-2006 the company was reported to be developing a proprietary operating system to handle functions such as navigation, telematics and driving support. Under joint development with the Center for Embedded Computing Systems of Nagoya University, the OS is scheduled for commercial introduction in 2010.
Toyota has defined its future automotive needs to include a single multi-core microprocessor, supporting parallel execution of the information OS and the control OS. The joint effort with Nagoya University is on the information systems OS and functions to link that to the control systems OS. The information OS is being developed from a Unix base. Linking functions will include communications between the two operating systems, and a function to allocate microprocessor resources.
Toyota plans to make the results of the research available to other automobile and automotive electronics manufacturers via the Japan Automotive Software Platform and Architecture (JasPar) group, a standards organisation with similar aims to AUTOSAR.
What of Linux?
Wind River is a global leader in device software optimisation (DSO), which supports companies to “develop, run and manage software faster, better, at lower cost and more reliably”. It is also the world’s largest real-time operating system (RTOS) vendor, and after Microsoft the largest embedded OS provider.
The VxWorks RTOS has enjoyed a position as the market leader, but has lost market share to both Microsoft and embedded Linux in recent years. In response, in February the company acquired the intellectual property rights for RTLinux, a commercially available, patented, hard real-time Linux technology. Wind River was already a member of the Mobile Linux Initiative workgroup of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) organisation.
Chief marketing officer John Bruggeman has canvassed the opinions of his company’s auto customers on developments in infotainment software. “Everyone seems to think the game will boil down to two big contenders: Linux and Windows. But because of some very basic business, technology and user-experience factors, Linux will become the platform of choice.
“Why should this be? First, there is brand. Brand is everything in the automotive world. We associate different car brands with different levels of safety, luxury and driving experience. Naturally, car companies want the user experience to be in perfect alignment with their brand values.
“The Microsoft brand means PCs, not cars. What automotive experts consistently told me is that Microsoft is great at building the PC experience. But it does not have world-class expertise at building the ultimate driving experience. Automotive manufacturers don’t want a Windows-like look and feel anywhere near their cars. It’s counter to the branded user experience they’ve spent years and billions of dollars building.
“Second, their customers don’t simply want PCs installed in their cars. PCs, they believe, are fundamentally different from car infotainment and driver-assist devices. Take a look at the PC user experience. As a device, the PC requires a ‘primary focus’. That focus means the user’s direct and complete attention is mandatory, so he can handle drop down menus, mouse-overs, etc.
“In the car, the driver’s primary focus and primary device is simply driving. The infotainment system is a secondary device. Because a driver is hurtling down the autobahn at 100mph, the user requirements are fundamentally different than a PC’s. A Windows-based experience will only interfere with a driver’s primary focus.
“Third, the automotive experts believe using an infotainment system has to be simple and intuitive. It’s not for the power user. It needs to be for the average car buyer. Windows is simply too complicated for infotainment applications and average users. “Right now, most cars are equipped with radio/CD systems. Because of falling costs, this won’t be the case in two or three years as infotainment systems become pervasive. Proprietary RTOS companies will not be able to provide the necessary solutions unless they radically change their approach. In the future, the automotive industry will look more like the consumer electronics industry. Development cycles will be rapid, and requirements like MP4, Blu-ray and HD will grow exponentially.
“Small, old-line, proprietary OS companies are great in a world of radio/CD systems. But in a future world of pervasive auto infotainment and driver-assist systems, proprietary OS companies simply can’t and won’t keep up.”
So who is going to do it? According to the automotive experts Bruggeman consulted, Linux is emerging as the operating system of choice. More and more consumer devices use it and those devices often have the same features consumers want in their car systems.
“Infotainment is where luxury car companies are making their high margins, and it’s moving down to mid and low-end cars. And Linux is an adequate solution for infotainment applications. Nobody’s life was threatened when an audio system failed,” says Bruggeman.
But Linux is now quietly creeping into another set of high margin automotive applications not necessarily associated with infotainment. These are ‘driver assist’ functions that help you park your car, or change your ambient light setting, or adjust your rear-view mirror – the kind consumers perceive as high value.
“What’s more, those applications are all run out of the infotainment control unit. So the perception between what are ‘consumer electronics’ features in a car and ‘safety critical’ features is blurring.
|
| |
Author
Roger Bishop
|
| |
| |
|
| Email this article |
| |
|
|
|
|