Industry Articles

Suresh Marisetty, Durgesh Srivastava & Joel Andrew Hoffmann, Intel
embeddedinternetdesign.com (April 29, 2010)

Part 1 of this white paper presents an overview of the key technology blocks that make up the Intel-based IVI platform, as well as the challenges faced in optimizing and incorporating these into the platform.

Automotive manufacturers today face a tremendous challenge in trying to bridge the historically long development cycles of a vehicle to the ever-changing I/O and multimedia demands of the consumer. The main function of the car's entertainment system or the head unit is enabling a variety of functions like navigation, radio, DVD players, climate control, Bluetooth, and so on.

Further, with the promise of the connected car becoming a reality enabled through broad deployment of multimedia-capable mobile wireless technologies, the automotive industry sees an opportunity to deliver new value-added services to the consumer. However, with today's proprietary head-unit solutions they have limited ability to offer such services. A cost-effective solution to address this need is to use standards-based platform technologies that can take advantage of the huge ecosystem built around PC standards and consumer-oriented applications and services.

Introduction
We will start with the architecture of an IVI platform with a brief introduction to the platform stack and delve into each of the stack components, both from an hardware and software perspective; we will also examine their interdependencies. The theme of discussion for each of these technology areas is as follows:

• Overview with usage models
  • By car OEM and end customers
• Challenges that:
  • Were overcome in optimizing and enabling various technology blocks for an Intel-based IVI platform
  • Remain to be addressed now and in the future by Intel Corporation, the car OEM, IHV/ISV/OSV, and academia for various usage models
• Opportunities that present themselves to:
  • Car OEM for product differentiation
  • Third party software and hardware vendors to enable new markets-ecosystem enabling
  • Academia for identifying areas of advanced research and technology development

An in-depth discussion follows covering the following technology building blocks for blocks for an Intel-based IVI platform:

• Intel-based IVI platform overview
• Usage models and software environments
• System on a Chip (SoC) Architectures for an Intel-based IVI platform
• Platform boot solution and latencies
• Multimedia (graphics/video/display/audio)
• Generic and automotive-specific I/O fabric
• Intel technologies with focus on Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel ® VT)
• Manageability and security
• Seamless connectivity
• Power management