In the Fiat stand at the Frankfurt Auto Show Wednesday morning (September 12) Microsoft and Fiat said they are expanding Blue & Me to include navigation. Martin Thall, general manager of Microsoft’s Automotive Business Unit, said a market opportunity exists between factory-installed navigation systems in the €1,500-2,000 price range and portable navigation devices. In a Fiat 500 the firms demonstrated what appeared to be a factory-installed navi display screen attached to the dashboard via a short tube. In fact, the display is a portable device and the tube is the visible portion of a docking station set into a special socket in the dash. Blue Map is only available in Europe at the moment and only as configured; however, a Fiat spokeswoman confirmed the obvious - that Microsoft and Fiat will encourage portable navi display vendors to build or adapt units to fit the docking station and socket. It looks cool and it makes sense.

As the number of electronic functions in a vehicle increase, so do the number of electronic control units (ECUs) required. That’s unavoidable in some cases, but in others, it’s possible and beneficial to reduce the total number of ECUs by controlling multiple functions from a single location. To that end, Robert Bosch LLC is developing what it calls a domain control unit (DCU). Kay Stepper, marketing manager for Bosch’s Chassis Systems Control Division, says the DCU is based on a 32-bit, 130nm multi-core microcontroller that’s optimized for advanced safety applications. In its current iteration the DCU will scale to 180MHz and come with up to 4MB of flash with error correction code. It will include a floating point unit, implement AUTOSAR, and include a FlexRay interface as well as CAN and LIN interfaces.

ST Microelectronics is offering 32Mb automotive-grade (-40 to 125°C) NOR Flash devices manufactured on a 0.11-micron process. They’re promising 64Mb devices in Q2 and 128Mbit parts by the end of the year. The low end of the ST automotive-grade NOR Flash line is 4Mb. Competitor Spansion offers MirrorBit NOR products in densities from 16Mb to 1Gb.

ST’s 32Mbit M29W30 targets dashboard systems and multimedia, among other automotive applications. The devices can be read, programmed and erased over a 2.7V to 3.6V power supply range. Asynchronous random access time is 70ns, and typical byte or word programming time is 10µs. Data retention is guaranteed at 20 years minimum, and write endurance is 100,000 program/erase cycles per block. The chip can be organized in 8-bit or 16-bit words. Other features include independent block erase, optional Fast Programming, and a 64-bit security code.

The more we get, the more we want, at least in terms of sound quality and entertainment options, and on that premise, Texas Instruments has launched a new 8-channel audio DSP, TAS3108, in both auto and home flavors. It’s currently in production, with the automotive version (TAS3108AIDCP) priced at $4.91 in 10k quantities.

TI sees a trend toward multi-channel sound in its auto audio business. “Multi-channel meant 5.1 until about a year ago; now it’s 7.1,” says automotive audio marketing manager Ryan Reynolds. Besides more channels and higher output power per-channel, there’s a need to accommodate more sources, such as satellite and HD radio, and various compressed audio formats, not to mention rear-seat entertainment. In short, OEMs see infotainment as an opportunity for differentiation, and that leads to the need for greater processing capability.

Packaged in a 4.4 x 9.7mm, 38-pin TSSOP, the TAS3108 is AECQ100-qualified and TS16949 certified, and it operates over the -40 to 105 °C temperature range. Based on a 135MHz, 48-bit fixed-point DSP core and 8051 MCU, the chip is rated at 675 MIPS. It can perform five simultaneous instructions per clock cycle and, with single-cycle, 76-bit (48x28) multiply-accumulate, is capable of 135 million multiple accumulates per-second (135 MMACS) performance.

Application development aids include both a a drag-and-drop graphical development environment (GDE) with pre-optimized components, and a text-based integrated development environment (IDE). Reynolds says the GDE lets customers program and control each component in real time, and to publish their own components, with proprietary algorithms.

ARM has rolled out a successor to its popular but aging ARM7TDMI processor core. CPU product manager Richard York describes the new Cortex-R4 as a midrange microprocessor that fills the gap between the M3 at the low end, and the high-performance A8 and ARM 1156. Those products all leverage the firm’s 16/32-bit Thumb-2 instruction set, so ARM7 applications should work on the R4, only better, because the new chip is said to be four to five times faster than the ARM7 (200-250MHz versus 40-50MHz), and offer double the instruction execution efficiency. Size-wise, the new chip contains about triple the number of gates in the ARM7, but York figures that with advanced processes it shouldn’t require much more silicon, and even if it did, the performance gain would justify the extra cost.

The efficiency gain comes from features like a vectored interrupt controller (VIC) port that saves clock cycles by doing in hardware what the ARM7 does in software. The VIC works in concert with a pre-fetch and branch prediction unit to keep the processor continually fed with data. The R4 can be configured with up to 64KB of instruction cache and 64Kb of data cache (versus 0KB of data cache in the ARM7).

The R4 also includes an OSEK-compliant memory protection unit; a tightly coupled memory (TCM) arbiter and interface for 2-cycle local memory access with ECC support; a 64-bit AMBA 3 AXI master interface, and a 64-bit AMBA 3 AXI slave interface, the latter including a DMA port. For developers, ARM’s new microprocessor offers CoreSight debug and embedded trace macrocell (ETM) ports.

York obviously hopes that customers will use the R4 to take applications to the next level. He suggested, for example, that a customer using the ARM7 core in an ABS application might consider the R4 for ESP chassis control.

Texas Instruments, which uses the ARM7 in its TMS470 microcontroller family, is evaluating the R4 but has not yet committed to it. Competitors/customers Freescale (PowerPC), Renesas Technology (SH-4) and NEC Electronics America V850 were unavailable for comment.