Altera is working with German firm TRS-STAR to introduce its first fully scalable infotainment platform for the automotive market.

Featuring an Altera Stratix II FPGA, TRS-STAR’s platform called Paris targets automotive multimedia systems used for entertainment and telematics systems in cars.

The platform supports CAN, MOST, USB, Ethernet and SDHC interfaces and features a scalable automotive graphics system with multiple video-in and video-out functionalities, an audio processing module, and an application processor.

Altera has used external hardware and software intellectual property (IP) to develop the system which includes a pre-programmed board featuring an Altera Stratix II FPGA, a WVGA touch-screen TFT display, reference designs, software stacks and drivers, cabling, power supply, and resource CDs with documentation.

It also provides demonstration designs and a library of IP functions that designers can use to create differentiated infotainment products or adapt existing products.

There is also an option to use Altera’s lower cost HardCopy II structured Asics.

“Traditionally, infotainment designers used different microcontrollers with often inconsistent hardware and software frameworks in their system platform, which exposes customers to the risk of system obsolescence as the controller definition is not portable to future semiconductor technologies,” said Manfred Schwarztrauber, president of the MSC Group and general manager of TRS-STAR.

According to Tim Colleran, v-p of Altera’s consumer and automotive business unit: “The Paris platform, with an FPGA at its core, is unique because it offers automotive infotainment designers a single, fully scalable system platform featuring hardware, software and IP.”

According to the market research firm iSuppli, the total automotive infotainment market is expected to be more than $50bn by 2012. 

The Paris development platform is being sampled by leading customers and is expected to be generally available starting the first quarter of 2008.