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 The replacement of hardware by software has been one of the most significant trends in the electronics industry for many years but it has largely been invisible to the end user. Very few drivers of new cars equipped with the latest digital car radios will know or care that the FM, AM and stereo decoder functions, plus all of the volume, balance, fader, loudness and tone controls are implemented as algorithms running on embedded DSPs instead of dedicated circuits. This is now changing because the kind of solutions that semiconductor manufacturers can deliver at economically viable prices is increasingly challenging the need both for electronic and mechanical hardware. Spoken commands, for example, will be increasingly used to control electrical and electronic appliances, gradually removing the need for keypads, switches, potentiometers and other mechanical interfaces. Of course, they will co-exist for some time but we can already anticipate mobile phones built into wristwatches where there will be no buttons to press and simply saying "Call Jane at her work number" will be enough to make the call. For manufacturers of mechanical instruments and interfaces, these are worrying times - whole markets could vanish quickly as microelectronics, in the form of software running on a cost-optimized hardware platforms, provides a better solution. What have slide rules got in common with galvanized zinc buckets? The answer is that you can't buy them anymore because they were both made rapidly obsolete by new technology. There was a time when every engineer carried a slide rule to calculate products, quotients, logarithms, sines and cosines ... and then the pocket calculator appeared and the slide rule market died, just as the development of cheap, robust plastic materials killed the market for galvanized buckets. For manufacturers of speedometers, rev counters, temperature gauges and all the other mechanical instruments found in car dashboards, the end may not be as sudden but they too are under threat, judging by the results of a joint research project carried out by ST, Robert Bosch, the Fiat Research Center and the University of Genova. THE VIRTUAL DASHBOARD ST and its partners are investigating in the ACTIVE project (Arbitrarily Configurable Customer Tailored Instrument for Vehicle application), part of the European "ESPRIT IV Information Access and Interfaces" program, the replacement of the cluster of mechanical instruments of a conventional car dashboard by a single reconfigurable display that delivers all the required information via a single, customizable unit. Replacing a cluster of mechanical instruments by a software-configurable display could bring major benefits to both the car manufacturers and their customers. Car makers could customize the dashboard instrument panel in the last phases of manufacturing, with a single display model used for different cars or different versions of the same model. Compare this with today's practice, where one current model on the market needs 147 different dashboard combinations for all of its variations! Drivers could also choose from a variety of dashboard options, selecting a "dashboard theme" in the same way that PC users today select a desktop theme. The key challenge of the ACTIVE project is that the virtual dashboard must perform at least as well as mechanical instruments while supporting both customer choice within a particular vehicle and fast time-to-market for the car manufacturer for each new implementation. The prototype, which has been implemented in a demonstration vehicle by Fiat, is based on a market-proven single-chip PC architecture from ST known as the STPC Consumer and encapsulates the end-user and instrumentation knowledge of Bosch and Fiat, the software expertise of the University of Genova and ST's ability to provide both the cost-optimized silicon and the software libraries required to support the application. Figure 1 shows the architecture of the virtual dashboard. The display is a standard commercial Active Matrix LCD display with a resolution of 1024x600 pixels, with the STPC providing all of the processing and graphics functions.  Figure 1  The ACTIVE application dynamically draws the instruments on the dashboard in response to data from the vehicle's CAN (Car Area Network) bus, refreshing the display at 25-30 frames/second with dynamic antialiasing and double buffering. Additional information, such as images from a rear-view camera, can also be displayed without degrading the performance of the dashboard. The 66MHz STPC Consumer is functionally equivalent to a conventional 486 PC plus an embedded graphic processor but the STPC's Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) allows faster data transfer between system and video memory, enabling graphics performance typical of more powerful platforms to be achieved at very low system cost. More importantly, the high graphics performance of the STPC Consumer, coupled with the use of native C optimizations, allowed the application software to be written in Java, which shortened the application development time and provided platform independence for future evolution. The application software was developed in Java with JDK 1.1, supported by an Optimized Graphic Library developed by ST. This contains basic objects such as Bitmap, TextField, Pointer (to draw rotating needles), Filled Gauge (to draw bar indicators) and so on that can be assembled to create any dashboard design. This library implements a mixed approach to graphics, using pure Java APIs to draw the parts that can be antialiased statically (Bitmaps, Textfields) and optimized native C methods to draw the parts that need fast dynamic antialiasing (e.g. at the edge of moving needles). Experimental results using this approach show applications running at 50-55 frames/second, compared to 2 frames/second using pure Java on the STPC. Comparisons performed at the University of Genova show that to achieve 55 frames/second on a standard PC architecture without native optimizations would require a 333 MHz Pentium II platform!  |
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