THE HANSEN REPORT ON AUTOMOTIVE ELECTRONICS. A Business and Technology Newsletter VOL. 18, NO. 10◆◆ PORTSMOUTH, NH USA DEC. 2005/JAN. 2006 Car Audio/Video Bosch-Denso JV Delivers Update from CES T-Engine Infotainment Platform T-Kernel Operating System vendors and other providers. Programmers with experience in ITRON will easily be Every January a flurry of new product Based on ITRON able to adapt to T-Kernel. According to announcements surrounds the Interna- Is Royalty-Free the T-Engine Forum Web site, “ITRON is tional Consumer Electronics show in Las the world’s number-one adopted standard Vegas, held this year from January 5-8. The infotainment market is about to in the field of embedded systems.” Based The world’s mobile electronics suppliers get a whole lot more competitive. The on proven technology, T-Kernel is robust channel creativity and technical expertise Hansen Report recently learned that the and, like micro-ITRON, it has a small into a variety of multimedia entertain- Bosch Blaupunkt-Denso joint venture footprint, which minimizes memory and ment, infotainment, communications, chartered in July 2003 to develop a new computer overhead. telematics—you name it—devices that multimedia computing platform for its According to the T-Engine Forum, might make one believe again that spend- parents is delivering a platform based on while ITRON standardized the API (ap- ing countless hours in a car could be, if T-Engine, an all-encompassing develop- plication programming interface) for basic not actually fun, then at least not mo- ment environment created by the Japa- functions of the operating system, it notonous. nese electronics industry. Blaupunkt and lacked standards or guidelines for hard- The idea that the car should be an ex- Denso will almost certainly make the spe- ware, device drivers and a development tension of the office and “wasted” com- cially developed T-Engine platform the environment. T-Engine widened the muting hours could be productive work basis for almost every new navigation scope of standardization so that T-Kernel time might be giving way to the notion of and multimedia product planned for the enables the distribution of middleware on the car as an extension of the family future. top of the existing basic ITRON RTOS room. For someone willing to hang up and With a standard platform in place and (real-time operating system) functions. drive, a wide selection of entertainment much of the engineering work already on The biggest goal of T-Engine was to en- options can make a long commute or a the shelf, Bosch and Denso will be able to able distribution of software resources in- family road trip more enjoyable. quickly respond to OEM market opportu- dependent of CPU architecture. nities with full-featured, highly competi- Some legal questions surrounding the Satellite Radio tive product offerings. The first new Linux general public license influenced Since its launch of service in Septem- Blaupunkt and Denso products based on ADIT’s choice of an OS. T-Kernel licens- ber 2001, XM Satellite Radio had en- T-Engine could ship as soon as the end of ees are under no obligation to make al- rolled more than 6 million subscribers as 2006 or early in 2007. tered T-Kernel code open to the public, of year-end 2005 and continues to forecast Before selecting T-Engine, the 50-50 which means they can safeguard their a subscriber base of 20 million by 2010. joint venture by Denso and Bosch known product know-how. Versions of the T-Ker- Sirius Satellite Radio, which began as ADIT (Advanced Driver Information nel standard are maintained by the T-En- broadcasting nine months after XM, re- Technology) had considered a number of gine Forum. ported 3.3 million subscribers at the end operating systems. Denso engineers fa- The ADIT platform’s two main of the year, 2.2 million of them added in vored Linux, WinCE and T-Engine, while microcontrollers were developed jointly 2005. Satellite radio service at $12.95 per Bosch engineers supported VxWorks, by ADIT and NEC; NEC will be the sole month ranked thirteenth in consumer QNX and T-Engine. supplier of the two ASICs (application interest in J.D. Power and Associates’ Unlike other candidate operating sys- specific integrated circuits) designed spe- 2005 U.S. Automotive Emerging Tech- tems WinCE from Microsoft, VxWorks cifically and exclusively for Bosch and nologies study. from Wind River and QNX from Harman Denso’s use. In order to provide scalability Beginning in 2006 Hyundai will start International, the T-Engine operating from mid- to the very high-end price/per- implementing its plan to make satellite system—called T-Kernel—is royalty-free. formance, the platform’s architecture can radio standard in all models. Delphi Corp. And no less important, since T-Kernel is a accommodate a one- or two-microcon- will supply receivers for the Santa Fe, follow-on to the vastly popular micro- troller chip solution; one chip delivers Azera and Elantra models. ITRON operating system, the platform 800 million instructions per second and Turn to CES, page 3 will have wide industry support from tool Turn to T-Engine, page 2 T-Engine... Continued from page 1 on theT-Kernel RTOS. T-Engine was the other 1.3 billion instructions per sec- T-Engine Development ond. First functional silicon samples of the conceived by Professor Ken Sakamura of chips have been completed. Tokyo University. In the 1980s, Dr. Environment Unlike the QNX operating system and Sakamura launched the TRON project, T-Kernel: An open source, real-time (sub- development environment from Harman, from which came ITRON, the hugely microsecond) operating system that’s which is used not only by Harman but is popular real-time operating system. royalty free. Modifications of T-Kernel will also actively promoted commercially to The T-Engine Forum is a huge and po- be strictly controlled to maintain compatibil- other infotainment suppliers, the ADIT tentially powerful organization. Forum ity with the middleware it is to run and the platform was developed for the exclusive board members active in the automotive microcontroller that will run it. T-Kernel is a use of Blaupunkt and Denso. industry include Denso, Hitachi, Mat- close relative of ITRON, the world’s most Aimed broadly at infotainment mar- sushita Electric Industrial, Microsoft, Sun, popular embedded operating system. kets served by both Denso and Blaupunkt, Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, Renesas and Middleware: A growing library of ADIT developed middleware to support Toshiba. The vast majority of forum mem- middleware includes device drivers, network RDS TMC data communications applica- bers are Japanese. protocol stacks, filing systems, Japanese tions in Europe and DARC VICS com- With headquarters in Kariya City, language processing, eTRON security munications applications in Japan. Aichi prefecture, Japan, and an office in software, graphical user interfaces, voice Resource management software was also Hildesheim, Germany, the home of processing and a Java runtime environ- developed by ADIT as well as certain ap- Blaupunkt, ADIT employs about 55 ment. plication software, for example a browser people. ADIT serves just two companies, 32-Bit standard hardware platform: and DVD player. Bosch and Denso, but those two compa- Includes target system processor boards Managed by the T-Engine Forum, T- nies are respectively the number-one and based on SH, MR, ARM and MIPS series Engine encompasses a 32-bit microcon- number-four global automotive OEM sup- processors. troller hardware reference platform, a pliers. Denso is among the world’s top T-Engine Forum: Established in June 2002, standard real-time operating system and a three manufacturers of navigation equip- the T-Engine Forum conducts R&D and wide selection of middleware that can run ment. ◆ promotes the popularization of the T-Engine architecture. The Forum lists 491 member companies and universities. Microsoft Targets Infotainment Main benefits of T-Engine architecture: Enables the speedy development of Since Harman International acquired shortened the name to simply Windows inexpensive embedded computing systems. operating system maker QNX, Harman’s Automotive. Version 5 of Windows Auto- Web site: www.t-engine.org competitors in automotive audio and motive followed in July 2005. According infotainment such as Visteon, Delphi and to Microsoft, Windows Automotive-based THE HANSEN REPORT ON Johnson Controls, who have developed navigation and entertainment systems are AUTOMOTIVE ELECTRONICS products based on QNX’s software, are re- shipping today in “61 preinstalled, dealer examining their OS options, according to option and aftermarket devices from 18 © 2006 Paul Hansen Associates, 150 Peter Wengert, global director for the world-class automakers and suppliers,” Pinehurst Rd., Portsmouth, NH 03801, Microsoft Automotive Business Unit. including Alpine, Panasonic, Mitsubishi USA. Telephone: 603-431-5859. Fax: 603- Windows Automotive is definitely an Electric, Pioneer, Kenwood and Clarion. 431-5791. Email: [email protected]. available option, and Mr. Wengert admit- The company estimates between 300,000 All rights reserved. Materials may not be ted, “Microsoft is getting a lot more phone and 500,000 navigation systems in the reproduced in any form without written per- calls,” from suppliers seeking an alterna- U.S. today are running on Windows Au- mission. The Hansen Report on Automotive tive platform. tomotive. Electronics is published 10 times a year, Microsoft’s Automotive Business Unit Alpine Electronics selected the Win- monthly; July/August and December/Janu- has been developing software for the auto- dows Automotive platform for all its mid- ary are combined issues. The annual sub- motive industry for more than a decade. term AVNC (audio, video, navigation, scription rate is $717 (North America), $747 Its first venture, the Windows CE-based communications) products under develop- (elsewhere). Back issues are available for AutoPC, developed with Clarion as an ment for both OEM and aftermarket ap- $50 each; see our online index at aftermarket product, never gained wide plications.