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Altera has teamed up with design-in distributor Trs-Star to create an all-in-one multimedia platform for the in-car entertainment system market.

A Stratix II FPGA lies at the heart of the in-car multimedia system platform which has been created by the German distributor. Called Paris, the development platform supports CAN, MOST, USB, Ethernet and SDHC interfaces. By virtue of the FPGA it has a scalable automotive graphics system with multiple video-in and video-out functionalities, an audio processing module, and an application processor.

Intellectual property from no fewer than 12 hardware and software providers is used in the development 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 quickly adapt the products to changing market demands. Its scalable framework, which can replace a number of different generations of microcontroller, offers up to 50 per cent less development time and system cost," said Altera.

“Traditionally, infotainment designers used different microcontrollers with often inconsistent hardware and software frameworks in their system platform,” said Manfred Schwarztrauber, general manager of Trs-Star, which is part of the MSC Group. “This not only lengthens the development time and increases system cost, but also exposes customers to the risk of system obsolescence as the controller definition is not portable to future semiconductor technologies."

There is also a lower cost alternative based on Cyclone II and Cyclone III FPGAs.The route to volume production will be provided by Altera’s HardCopy II structured Asics.

According to the market research firm iSuppli, the total automotive infotainment market is expected to be more than $50bn by 2012. “While automobile production is experiencing a steady 3 per cent compound annual growth rate, the automotive infotainment segment is expanding much more rapidly. We forecast the automotive infotainment market, which remains largely untapped today, to experience an eight percent CAGR from 2006 to 2013,” said Richard Robinson, principal analyst at iSuppli.

The development platform is currently being sampled by leading customers.