Wind River and Intel cooperating on Open Source for the automobile sector

Wind River announced at Telematics in Detroit on May 20 that Intel and they are planning to bring out their jointly built Linux platform for the automobile sector with Moblin.org by August 2008. The platform is optimised for the Intel Atom processor and is aimed at infotainment applications for devices installed permanently in vehicles.

Wind River also announced that a commercial Linux platform would be brought out in the third quarter of 2009. The "Wind River Linux Platform for Infotainment" is intended to shorten the time taken to develop applications. Speech recognition and speech/text conversion software by Nuance Communications and echo and noise suppression for Bluetooth by Parrot form part of the platform. Gracenote is providing automatic playlists and the SMSC music management system that supplies multimedia networking. DVDs will be played using Corel's LinDVD.

In order to cope with in-car operation, the developers are mainly focusing on 3D graphics, short boot-up times, fast initialization, sophisticated power management and networking with the vehicle's electronics. The standard to be used here is Media-Oriented Systems Transport (MOST), while communications are handled by the CAN (Controller Area Network) bus. The systems will support all important video and audio standards. Likewise, it will possible to connect iPods and related multimedia equipment.

(Axel Urbanski)

(trk)