Electronic systems such as in-car entertainment are seen as critical elements of vehicle design by car manufacturers, according to an automotive market specialist at Xilinx.
For more than a decade the automotive industry has been steadily increasing the amount of electronics technology in cars, but only now are electronic systems for in-car entertainment, displays and driver assistance being used as important differentiators for new mass-market vehicles.
“It has been a gradual process but electronics is now on the critical path for the development of new cars,” Alix Coxon, Xilinx’s automotive marketing manager told EW.
Coxon believes it is in the areas of infotainment and networking where electronics is making the biggest impact in volume cars but she sees driver assistance systems as key for high-end vehicles. “As a result - for example - there are 18 FPGAs in the latest Mercedes S-Class,” said Coxon.
According to Coxon, the benefit to car designers of using FPGAs rather than lower cost discrete microcontrollers and DSP is the level of integration which can be offered for the newer forms of display and driver assistance systems. “In driver assistance systems it is the parallelism of the FPGA which is good for image processing,” said Coxon.
“In many cases we are getting the customer to re-think the problem and there is certainly growing interest from car manufacturers,” said Coxon.
Xilinx is planning to capitalise on the wider adoption of electronic technology with its latest range of Spartan-3A and Spartan-3A DSP FPGAs which are automotive-qualified devices.
Aimed at in-car networking and display control, the XA Spartan-3A FPGAs offer a high ratio of I/O per logic cell and scalability for I/O-intensive display and LED backlight applications.