(iTers News) - Cars of tomorrow will be as smart as today’s smart phones. Coming complete with vision and motion sensors, surround view cameras, and wireless connectivity technologies, they will be able to talk to other cars in the vicinity, or detect and see around it to avoid a car crash, or collisions with pedestrians

Halfway on the road toward that vision, Freescale Semiconductor unveiled an array of future-proof chipset solutions for a next generation of an open source OS-based car infotainment system as well as a next generation of in-vehicle connectivity technologies.

Coming to the fore is Freescale’s i.MX 6 series processor, an ARM Cortex-A9 core-based scalable CPU that can implement up to quad cores. 

Freescale has integrated the i.MX 6 series processors and three GPU cores from GPU core IP provider Vivante Corp. into a single piece of silicon wafer to power up what’s called as AVN, or Audio, Video and Navigation.

Running on Android OS, the AVN is the world’s first open OS-based in-vehicle instrument cluster, a digital replacement to traditional instrument cluster.

As it comes complete with OS and CPU platform, it is nothing short of a full-scale computing device, allowing car owners to download apps and new functionality whenever they want, update them over the air through the Internet, and even sync with their smart phone to turn on and off their car engine.

Freescale has integrated three GPU cores - 3D GPU for advanced graphics, a vector graphics GPU, and a composition GPU- to support various automotive-grade graphical user interfaces in what’s called as a heterogeneous computing architecture.

The vector graphics GPU is designed to render objects requiring a high degree of anti-aliasing and true type fonts, while a composition GPU is for advanced graphics plane blending.           

The solution also supports various video codecs, graphical accelerations, as well as e web-browsing performance, and full HD resolution.

The solution has secured a flurry of design-wins from world’s top-tier car maker for the mass-rollout in 2017.

Freescale also demonstrated a chip solution for AVM, or around view monitor system. The AVM system comes with four fish-eye lenses on front, rear, left and right sides to allow car drivers to see around his car in a 360 degree angle with no blind area. Freescale’s i.MX 6 series processor is at the heart of the chip solution to decode and encode tones of pixel-rich real-time image information. The transfer the massive amount of real-time image data, it also comes built a gigabit speed in-vehicle Ethernet connectivity technology called as AVB low latency network protocol. 

The chipmaker also demonstrates a next generation of in-vehicle wireless car connectivity technology Miracast which enables car owners to wirelessly sync their smart phones and car infotainment system

Photos and Videos by JH BAE