Automotive

Wind River Expertise Recognized with GENIVI Award

By Franz Walkembach

The Automotive group at Wind River is quite an impressive team…Consider this: hundreds of engineers and decades of successfully completed projects have helped Wind River carefully foster the development in this industry. We not only created trusted connections with customers and partners, but we’ve also stayed ahead of key trends, riding a wave of open source innovation right as it started to build momentum. Fast forward to today…our ongoing efforts to advance the automotive industry has reached another great achievement – Wind River has received the Most Valuable Contributor Award from the GENIVI Alliance.

A path to GENIVI

Wind River has long been one of the most active members in the GENIVI Alliance. We were among the first to join the alliance, and we’ve contributed regularly to the project since. We have members sitting on the board of directors, teams involved in expert groups such as the Baseline Integration Team (BIT) and the System Infrastructure Expert Group, and we are also taking part in numerous joint marketing activities.

Highlighted as a Silver sponsor at the last GENIVI All Members Meeting in Barcelona, we made the best of the whole experience, receiving excellent feed-back during our demos and customer meetings.

The alliance is an ideal environment for technology development and building meaningful relations with the relevant industry players. Thanks to the hard working Wind River team, we became among the first to provide offerings that were GENIVI 3.0 compliant. We’ve continued to make the most out of our appearances at GENIVI All Member Meetings and reach out to some of the most important automotive OEMs and Tier 1 companies worldwide. As automotive trends evolve, Wind River will continue to rise to meet the needs of customers at every step and beyond.

The road ahead

Let’s consider some recent GENIVI milestones and activities:

• Our Wind River Platform for Infotainment (PFI) follows the GENIVI compliance program closely to ensure compliance at each step, with major versions of PFI in sync with the 6 month release cycle of the GENIVI Alliance.
• Wind River is aligned with GENIVI and the Yocto Project for automotive IVI, in key roles right at the crossroads of the two groups. Our engagement in the GENIVI BIT team serves us well with respect to the Yocto Project and our Wind River PFI. The latest version of Wind River PFI is derived from the Yocto GENIVI Baseline - Discovery release, which consists of two layers of the Yocto Project. Wind River is committed to advancing open source and supporting the Yocto Project, in fact, Wind River Linux is also based on Yocto Project open source development infrastructure.
• The “Works with GENIVI” (WwG) program is for GENIVI members who produce either commercial or open source software that works with IVI platforms. Our Wind River Connectivity Solution Accelerator, software that allows IVI systems to view and play content from iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads, is  listed and will be one of the first WwG products.
• We are committed to GENIVI and will continue our active contributions to GENIVI Expert Groups and through active participation in events and meetings.

As you can see, our impact to GENIVI is very concrete, very real. We find it quite interesting and stimulating to work with innovative people, developing compliant base code and advancing open source for the automotive industry. GENIVI’s Most Valuable Contributor Award is definitely a great recognition for these efforts.

Once more,a big thanks to the team for being so keen and hard working. Given the challenging demands of the auto industry, it really takes an innovative group of folks to achieve success! Many more exciting developments are still to come, so stay in touch!

For additional information from Wind River, visit us on Facebook. 

Wind River PFI achieves GENIVI 3.0 compliance

By Franz Walkembach

It’s new, it’s here, and we have it! The GENIVI Alliance recently released its latest compliance specification GENIVI 3.0, and Wind River Platform for Infotainment was among the first to achieve it. Why should this matter? It’s all about trust, scalability and quality.

GENIVI®, Autosar, Car Connectivity Consortium…these are all groups created in order to set up standards across the auto industry. A long-time expert in this domain, Wind River is a founding member of the GENIVI® Alliance, keeping pace with the latest IVI developments and even helping to drive some of the changes coming from the Alliance. Wind River participates on the GENIVI board, marketing council and several expert groups. Wind River’s engineers have been in charge of leading initiatives such as including Android inside a GENIVI design. They are also currently leading the BIT (base integration team).

As the BIT lead, Wind River plans and manages the ongoing team releases (every 6 weeks!), organizes and coordinates the BIT projects (e.g. Baseline automated testing). In addition, as Meta-IVI maintainer, Wind River releases and maintains a GENIVI baseline built on the Yocto project (also every 6 weeks). This baseline has to align with other GENIVI goals, like the IP policy and various contributors such as silicon vendors and users of the baselines.

GENIVI has been working towards a compliance program that further helps align the industry and simplify things such as automotive requirements. In October, the Alliance updated their compliance program, introducing the latest specifications for GENIVI Compliance 3.0. In the automotive world, where everybody knows everybody, and quality is of critical importance, compliance is increasingly becoming an effective way to show that a vendor is:

A) Well connected within the ecosystem,

B) Trusted with a solid reputation,

C) Up-to-date and drives innovative changes,

D) Offering software that meets the highest quality and latest requirements and is scalable across different platforms.

There are 19 parties registered in the compliance program so far. While most have received compliance with earlier GENIVI specifications (versions 1.0 or 2.0), just a few have achieved level 3.0 compliance. With every new compliance specifications release, a variety of new requirements are introduced for different stacks inside an IVI platform, like CE Connectivity, HMI-Application Framework, System Infrastructure, Networking and so on.

Currently, Wind River Platform for Infotainment has achieved GENIVI 3.0 compliance on a Freescale i.MX6 Sabre Lite board.  However, compliance is just one part of it. Our platform also comes with a wealth of other features such as:

• A semi Linux kernel (based on Yocto Meta-IVI)
• Optional solution accelerator such as an IPod software solution
• Downstream support
• ADK (Application developer kit) for user space development helps to develop applications and product demos in a couple of weeks
• PDK (Platform developer kit) for kernel space development to configure software platforms
• Patches to increase the quality of open source

Additionally, other silicon vendor BSP Compliance statements will follow soon.

Wind River Platform for Infotainment is a Linux-based, GENIVI-compliant run-time platform specifically tuned for the IVI market.  It can be used as a fast track for demo development or a solid core for platform development. The platform is designed, packaged and tested to support an all set of automotive features.

The GENIVI compliance program was launched in August 2011, and it’s been gaining quite serious momentum since then.  And of course, Wind River will be sure to continue to track closely with the compliance program at every step!

For additional information from Wind River, visit us on Facebook.

The GENIVI Universe

By Franz Walkembach

The Star Wars saga was one of those rare movies series that managed to create a new standard for an entire industry. It can leave you fascinated for the whole following week after you’ve seen it. You don’t even need an expensive video system to enjoy its rich and powerful action. While the automotive industry constantly hopes to wow consumers with state of art technologies and ever expanding capabilities, one has to wonder: “Does an automotive version of Star Wars exist? Something that creates a new standard for all of us to be measured against?” Oh yes, it exists and there is nothing alien about it.

It’s called GENIVI (a concatenation of Geneva, and the acronym IVI), and it is a non-profit industry alliance committed to driving the broad adoption of an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) open-source development platform. The alliance aims to align requirements, deliver reference implementations, offer certification programs, and foster a vibrant open-source IVI community. See? A new standard.

"Always in motion the future is"                      

The GENIVI Alliance was officially launched in March 2009 and its founding members included BMW Group, Wind River, Intel, GM, PSA, Delphi, Magneti-Marelli, and Visteon. Now, more than 180 companies are committed to this standard.

As one of the founding members of GENIVI, Wind River has been involved in the development of the first GENIVI based products for the automotive industry. For the Star Wars geeks, consider us one of the Jedi masters (perhaps, Yoda). Wind River has 8 members in the expert groups of GENIVI, and we’ve been actively contributing to the members’ open source repository by defining, developing, integrating, testing and sharing key automotive middleware components.

Wind River first secured GENIVI compliance in August 2011, with our Wind River Platform for Infotainment (PFI). All versions of Wind River PFI included GENIVI recommended components, several of these components actually being co-developed by Wind River. We recently showcased some of our latest capabilities at the last GENIVI All Member Meeting in Paris, where we presented a demo based on the GENIVI Audio Manager component. It demonstrated excellent results on routing of multiple independent audio streams from navigation or phone audio. These streams can run simultaneous and on multiple sources and sinks.

“The Force is strong with this one”                  

When the GENIVI Compliance Program was officially established last year, Wind River Platform for Infotainment (PFI) was one of the first software platforms awarded with GENIVI compliance 1.0. It is our Luke Skywalker if you will - powerful, reliable and possessing an incredible range of capabilities. We help customers save on development time and costs, allowing them to focus on the technologies that will differentiate their IVI products and accelerate time-to-market. Our deep expertise and solution accelerator technologies help make us a reliable partner for OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers.

Our Wind River PFI provides an excellent technology and tool foundation for customers who want to build IVI systems based on the GENIVI standard and now it is one of the first products which are awarded in the GENIVI Compliance 2.0 program. Keep watch for the next version.

In addition to Wind River PFI, Wind River provides world-class professional services. We have more than 100 automotive experts worldwide who concentrate their effort on software integration and customization with a special focus on selected function blocks of the middleware. We can even take full responsibility of function blocks so that customers can integrate these into the selected system hardware. The Wind River team offers a valuable blend of architectural design, expert technical skills, industry-specific knowledge, IP creation, process and project management methodology that can extend the capabilities of any engineering team. Our software integration process is used in several OEM projects and we are known to deliver on time and on budget.

 

For additional information from Wind River, visit us on Facebook.

Wind River Showcases the Yocto Project and GENIVI in IVI

By Franz Walkembach

We're looking forward to an upcoming global GENIVI all hands meeting that brings together major OEMs like BMW, Peugeot, Citroen, Nissan or Renault as well as automotive Tier 1 companies like Continental Automotive, Denso, Delphi and Bosch. Later this month, these organizations will gather for several days near Paris to discuss the current state of affairs and latest developments from the GENIVI Alliance. Some of the key things we’ll be discussing at this industry event include issues like connectivity, security software in automobiles, Android and detailed findings from expert technology workgroups such as the BIT (baseline integration team) team or the automotive expert group.

As an exciting show of technology capabilities, Wind River will be demonstrating the first examples of a GENIVI-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) platform that was created using the Yocto Project. This is significant because this type of new platform can better help customers build their own software platform for IVI systems based on open source foundations. It would enable them to reduce cost and time to market by leveraging open source experience from commercial providers such as Wind River. The demo includes reference boards from major silicon vendors such as Freescale and Texas Instruments, adds Wind River tool chain components and the latest GENIVI-platform release. Wind River will also showcase its own IP components such as fast boot performance capabilities.

Another demonstration will highlight Wind River Hypervisor running on Intel silicon showcasing 3 different guest partitions (one real time OS and 2 Linux based OS) supporting a shared graphics concept, which is still a unique and breakthrough capability in the IVI software industry. It addresses several key automotive issues needs such as safety certification, fast boot or bill of material reduction.

By providing such a strong representation of a wide variety of technologies, from GENIVI and Linux running alongside VxWorks to Android, Wind River continues to support the automotive industry in all their product groups. While at the GENIVI All Hands meeting, member companies will have a chance to see these technologies first hand at the Wind River table. There’s no doubt that our jam-packed week of specialized sessions and eye-opening technical demonstrations will make for a memorable gathering.

 

For additional information from Wind River, visit us on Facebook.

A Gathering of Automotive Minds from GENIVI

By Franz Walkembach

Recently, Wind River hosted an industry meeting with the GENIVI System Infrastructure and the Automotive Expert group. These groups include a diverse range of executives representing the major automotive Tier 1 suppliers and OEMs such as e.g. BMW, Volvo, Magneti Marelli, Harman, Continental, Collabora andor XSE. It was a great opportunity to round up automotive leaders to discuss the latest industry developments, challenges and insights. The group makes an effort to meet on a regular basis in order to stay on top of hot issues and breakthroughs.

The System Infrastructure group discussed the issue of evolving in-vehicle infotainment requirements and key use cases for automotive software packages including persistence manager, personalization and subsystem architecture blocks like e.g. the boot process of an In-vehicle Infotainment system. Recently Wind River had outstanding results in optimization this boot process in Linux or Android based systems.

Running concurrently with the System Infrastructure group’s meeting, Wind River also hosted GENIVI’s Automotive Expert group. The Automotive Expert group’s session dove deep into technical discussions around issues of software architecture such as the importance of INCM (Inter Node Connection Manager) in a head unit, which defines how to connect with components from Autosar or CAN. Another hot topic was software management. The In this meeting, our Wind River team presented information around component details were described from Wind River and describe such as how to download and update software on a head unit (wired, wireless, full content or partially, via the dealer or service station)

The multi-day meeting ended with a highly interactive joint session with the Automotive Expert and System Expert groups that resulted in a lively Q&A. The regular GENIVI meetings have helped to focus teams around advancing the GENIVI platform and grow GENIVI-based IVI offerings. The gathering was a terrific way to cap off the year and get everyone excited for 2012.

 

For additional information from Wind River, visit http://www.facebook.com/WindRiverSystems.