Platform eases automotive infotainment design

Altera Corp. has introduced a scalable solution that enables design engineers to quickly and efficiently design multiple automotive infotainment products based on a single electronic design. Implemented in the company's Cyclone or Stratix FPGAs, the Altera Automotive Graphics System (AAGS) enables designers to overcome the lengthy and costly design cycles of fixed-function graphic controllers.

The AAGS design platform integrates Altera's Nios II embedded processor with third-party intellectual property (IP) and design tools from automotive graphics partners including:

• TES electronic solutions OpenGL ES-compliant graphics library and embedded 2D/3D graphic multiplatform library (eGML), for the real-time generation of display graphics;

• Imagem's spline-based library for handling bitmaps, frame buffer accesses, drawing of graphic primitives and object handing and movement;

• SEGGER's Microcontroller Systeme GmbH support for emWin; and

• Altia's GUI building tool for quick automotive human machine interface (HMI) development.

In addition to the Nios II processor, the AAGS incorporates a LCD timing controller, a basic multilayer multidisplay controller, a spline manipulation engine and a vector graphics acceleration engine.