ARM helps bridge gap between consumer products and automotive infotainment

CAMBRIDGE, UK: ARM announced their Elected Charter seat on the board of directors of the GENIVI Alliance. ARM’s engagement in GENIVI is part of its overarching strategy to enable consumers with the same user experience across all forms of entertainment equipment, wherever and whenever they want.

The GENIVI alliance brings a new level of collaboration between automotive manufacturers, suppliers and technology providers looking to streamline the development and support of in-vehicle infotainment (IVI). GENIVI aims to provide a reusable, open source IVI platform that will deliver benefits including shorter development cycles and quicker time-to-market while opening up the innovation potential in automotive infotainment.

IVI is a rapidly growing and evolving area that brings together a wide range of automotive infotainment elements such as music, news, Internet, multimedia, navigation and phone communication. ARM and its extensive Partner ecosystem can now leverage its considerable knowledge and experience working with a wide range of these elements, together with many years of Linux-based open source collaborations, to deliver innovation and diversity to enhance the end-user automotive experience.

“In just 12 months since its inception, GENIVI has made great strides in the development and implementation of an open source software platform for automotive IVI applications,” said Graham Smethurst, GENIVI president. “The alliance is totally dependent upon the co-operation of its members and, as one of the industry’s greatest proponents of open standards, I believe ARM will be a great asset to GENIVI as we move forward.”

“NEC Electronics has a long history of developing world-class products for the automotive market. For the infotainment and navigation space, we have based our products around the ARM architecture, and as a fellow member of the GENIVI Alliance as well as an ARM partner, we are extremely pleased to see the leadership position that ARM is taking within the Alliance,” said Jim Trent, vice president and general manager, Multipurpose Microcontroller and Automotive Group, NEC Electronics America.

“We believe this will provide the automotive community with a stronger foundation for the innovative Infotainment features provided by the GENIVI platform. We will continue our close collaboration with ARM and GENIVI to help further drive adoption of this platform.”

“Samsung has been a leading supplier of ARM processors for the navigation and infotainment market,” said Yiwan Wong, vice president, System LSI marketing, Samsung Electronics. “We welcome the open platform initiatives promoted by GENIVI and have joined as a member in January 2010. We are very pleased to see that ARM has been elected to GENIVI’s board to provide continuous leadership to drive the initiative’s success.”

“Our engagement in GENIVI is a natural evolution of ARM's vision to enable the same compelling user experience across all forms of consumer equipment and continue our market leadership position in the area of automotive infotainment,” said Kevin Smith, vice president of segment marketing, ARM.

“The success of ARM’s business model is well demonstrated with a significant number of ARM Partners actively involved in delivering highly differentiated, software-compatible solutions into this segment and we look forward to driving further innovation as we take up this elected seat.”