Conceptualizing telematics and personalized transportation for the iGeneration

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Conceptualizing telematics and personalized transportation for the iGeneration [Copy link]

Like many people, I tend to analyze developing markets and technologies in three phases. The first is past trends, successes, and lessons learned; the second is the challenges we face now; and the third, I am a high optimist, the possibilities for what will happen in the future.

At the recent Telematics Update conference in Detroit, USA, I had the opportunity to feel the pulse of the industry, discuss pressing issues with stakeholders, and learn some great ideas about the direction we are heading.

It’s exciting to see that the enthusiasm and conversation around telematics and infotainment systems continues to thrive and grow. This year, the convergence of consumer and automotive electronics is a hot topic. As we all know, the automotive market is challenging. Bringing our technologies together—enabling the iGeneration to access information and engage with it as it moves through their lives—will require ingenuity and hard work.

Back in the day, James Bond talked to M in the 1963 film "From Russia with Love" on a full-sized handheld car radio with a thick cord and a stand the size of a video game console. It was very high-tech at the time. But fast forward a few decades, and now we have pocket-sized cell phones equipped with Bluetooth wireless technology that allow you to talk to your car's audio system. And many of the building blocks we see—Bluetooth, WLAN , UWB wireless communications , GPS , radar, screen graphics, and digital imaging—were not originally designed for automotive applications.

Automotive electronics: hindsight is better than proactive demands

In a very real sense, we have been merging different technologies into automotive applications for a long time. However, our challenge now is to respond more quickly to consumer-driven market demands, and we must accelerate the pace of new product development. Most consumers still do not place automotive compatibility as a high priority when purchasing personal devices - iPods, media players, PDAs, video games, etc. The question "Will my new gadget connect to the car?" is still more of an afterthought.

In the future, this may all change. At any given time, seamless compatibility may become a major influence on consumer purchasing decisions. I think of the iGeneration as a "consumer" who seeks an uninterrupted flow of information or entertainment as he or she walks from home to the car and into the office. In addition, they expect that the signal will switch from one place to another without quality issues; they also expect - if they have not already expressed an expectation - that the audio, display technology and connectivity in the in-vehicle environment will actually enhance the infotainment experience.

Obstacles

Most people would probably agree that we are well positioned to meet these expectations. And we can point to many challenges that have plagued our efforts in the past. First, the time to market and economies of scale for automotive and consumer products are significantly different. A company launching a new MP3 player is aiming to sell tens of millions of units in the consumer market; automotive sales cannot possibly reach these market numbers, so we must simplify the convergence of consumer and automotive and minimize the cost of adoption for both industries.

Market cycles and size differences present additional challenges. There are several different silicon architectures and a few RTOS (Real-Time Operating System) vendors that support more than one compressed audio/video format. In addition, there are three or four different wireless standards, several different graphics engine vendors, and so on. The end result is a dizzying array of potential telematics solutions.

This can be a good thing if you have the size, scale, and consumer traction to handle the needs of the market. However, the telematics market is still small and immature. Success stories are few and far between. This is not ideal for a telematics infrastructure that must learn to respond quickly to the demands of growing consumer and automotive convergence.

Solution

This is a significant short-term challenge, but by no means insurmountable. As a semiconductor provider, Freescale Semiconductor's Infotainment, Multimedia and Telematics Division (IMTD) is at the bottom of the telematics food chain. However, we can partner with different RTOS vendors, middleware, application providers and other players to jointly solve the challenges of telematics design to help automotive suppliers develop leading-edge products in a timely manner with low development costs. This is the essence of the mobileGT Alliance, which allows customers to work closely with member software and hardware vendors to build reference platforms based on the PowerPC architecture that meet their specific requirements.

Software and Hardware

Currently, software development may require three to four times more resources than hardware design. By outsourcing most of the software design work from automakers, the mobileGT reference platform may ease the difficulty of new product development and accelerate the design of new telematics solutions into vehicles. In addition, the more collaborative the project is, the more open resources and standard-based automotive platforms are needed, and the faster it is possible to respond to new consumer needs.

At Freescale, we are deeply studying the concept of autonomous driving. By successfully absorbing many related consumer electronics technologies and advanced safety and comfort system technologies, the autonomous driving platform will make the driving experience safer, more enjoyable and more informative than ever before.

Anand Ramamoorthy

General Manager, Infotainment, Multimedia and Telematics Division (IMTD), Transportation and Standard Products Group

Freescale Semiconductor