Posted on September 10, 2010
By Anthony Le
I remember when my father traded in our old family station wagon for a 4-door sedan – upgrading us to power windows and locks and a cassette player vs. the old 8-track. It was pretty fancy at the time. Fast forward to today. Auto electronics can park cars automatically, slow you down if you’re getting too close to the car in front of you and make a life-saving call if you’ve been in an accident. GM is now testing software to let you talk to your car to update status messages on Facebook. Times have changed.
As a segment marketing leader at Spansion, I follow the auto industry closely. The growth and development of auto electronics is quite exciting. Automotive infotainment is a prime example. Infotainment includes many functions, such as: music, news, Internet, multimedia, navigation, and telephony services. It not only entertains, but it monitors and protects us. Auto manufacturers and suppliers must develop, test, deploy and support these systems across different models and over multiple model generations. It is becoming increasingly complex and expensive.
The Genivi Alliance is a newly formed organization who’s driving an open-source development platform for infotainment to shorten development cycles, provide quicker time-to-market and reduce costs for all companies in the chain. Spansion is now supporting this effort as a newly approved Associate member.
Spansion’s been serving the auto industry for nearly 20 years and has seen the complexity of automotive electronics grow. As systems functionality increase, so does the operating system and application code that enables it, which creates the need for more and larger Flash memory devices.
I think the GENIVI platform is a good step for the industry as it standardizes a foundation of essential core services required by all infotainment systems. Automakers and their suppliers can add differentiated products and services on top of this common platform, allowing them to focus resources on developing value for their customers and not reinvent the base system functionality.
The charter of GENIVI matches our own philosophy – collaboration with the ecosystem to ensure Spansion Flash memory is easy to integrate with common software and hardware components. Whether through our own low-level Flash drivers or file systems to our universal footprint of common packaging and pinouts, Spansion is committed to providing its customers with a complete, easy to integrate solution. As a GENIVI member, Spansion joins other industry leaders throughout the automotive ecosystem including OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, independent software vendors, operating system providers and semiconductor manufacturers.
You can learn more about GENIVI Alliance at their website.