Micronas and VDO in favor of ARM core (0012)
Freiburg, August 28, 2000 - Micronas, supplier of chips for consumer and automotive applications, has licensed the ARM7TDMI processor core from ARM Ltd. Together with its partner, automotive supplier VDO, Micronas will develop and manufacture next-generation automotive controllers such as dashboard controllers, and a host of fast emerging applications automotive.
Dashboard controllers are responsible for a wide variety of control functions. For example, they supply the audio system with information about the speed of the car, enabling the system to adjust volume to speed. Another example: Dashboard controllers gather all relevant data concerning the motor operations in order to tell the driver to change oil at the optimum time.
Together with VDO, one of the world's leading automotive suppliers, Micronas controls more then 10 percent of the worldwide dashboard controller market. With the newly licensed ARM core the partners want to expand the success of this product.
Currently Micronas is developing highly integrated automotive controllers for applications specific to automotive dashboards, for driver information, navigation, communication, and entertainment systems. Next-generation entertainment systems, for instance, will allow every person in the car to select his or her favorite program in isolation. A new family of Integrated Circuits (ICs) with two on-chip digital signal processors and MP3-decoding/encoding blocks will be able to distribute individually selected audio channels separately to the different seats in the car.
"The members of the new IC family will be adjustable to the specific requirements of different applications which leads to highly scalable solutions", said Klaus Heberle, vice president automotive of Micronas. "The ARM cores are perfect for this role and will scale in both capability and flexibility to meet current and future needs. This translates into the capability of building both relatively simple and highly demanding systems for reasonable cost, leading to reduced development efforts, especially over a vast array of applications."
The new family also offers a high grade of flexibility in respect to the integration of different functional modules. The customer can dictate in which way they want to lay out the multimedia platform in the car. The customer has the freedom to decide where the data processing for the navigation system, for the driver information system, or for the entertainment system actually takes place. The customer simply has to program the ICs according to their application and their respective role in the system. Being able to find the most cost-effective solution for building the entire system is one of the key benefits of the modular approach. With the ARM-based ICs it is possible to create a wide range of different concepts (different architectures) for dashboard control. Micronas is able to support different approaches in a very cost-effective way.