Allowing a car driver and the front-seat passenger to see two different images on the same screen was being performed by an FPGA on the Altera stand at Embedded World in Nuremberg today (February 13, 2007).

"While the driver can look at Tom-Tom, the passenger can watch video," Ro Chawla, Altera's European senior manager, told Electronics Weekly.

The FPGA works with a Sharp display in which each pixel has a prism. Asked why the car industry was using FPGA for such a purpose, Dr Axel Zimmermann, market development manager for automotive at Altera, replied: "Because there's no hardwired Asic available. And there's no hardwired Asic available because it's too small a market. To pay for the cost of a 90nm device, you need to sell millions of parts. So we use FPGA.”

Both BMW and Mercedes plan to have cars out in the middle of this year using the dual screen technology.

The application shows how non-traditional FPGA markets like automotive are taking up programmable technology.

"Everything in automotive is going digital, and the challenge is the lack of flexibility with fixed solutions," said Chawla. "There's an issue with obsolescence, for instance with graphics controllers from companies which are driven by the PC and, when they obsolete a part, the customers are left high and dry. Also development times with Asic are becoming a problem. So people are looking at more flexible solutions for automotive."