Hardware & Software for In-Vehicle Infotainment System (IVI)

Client

Alpine Electronics of America, Inc — the consumer electronics subsidiary of the Japanese electronics component manufacturer Alps Electric, specializing in-car audio and navigation systems.

Challenge

When Alpine’s R&D-department designed their in-vehicle infotainment system (IVI), they requested our expertise for solving several engineering issues:

Qualcomm SA8155P SDK debugging,
AirPlay-server with two iOS-clients support development.

The project included a remote virtual display design in an Android system, Microsoft and Google DRM-systems implementation.

Solution

We used two operating systems: QNX 7 and Android 10.

We chose Qualcomm's SA8155P platform as the development framework as it is the best option for the fast deployment of high performance and energy-efficient applications.

Features of the platform:

SA8155P Snapdragon platform based on OS Android 10.
SA8155P includes eight Kryo CPUs, Qualcomm Adreno 640 GPU, and high-performance Hexagon 6 DSP.
Wi-Fi 802.11ax.
Bluetooth LE 5.1.

AirPlay-server supports AirPlay Apple protocol.

We also provided DRM support (digital rights management):

Microsoft PlayReady;
Google Widevine;
Apple AirPlay (demo mode).

Business Value

The customer has implemented our engineering solutions in the vehicle's infotainment system with the following capabilities:

displays vehicle service information: tyre pressure, climate control, speed, tachometers.
provides entertainment services: weather, music, radio (FM/AM, internet, DAB+, SiriusXM satellite radio), video playback from mobile phone users (Android + iOS), Netflix.

Our customer demonstrated the solution at the CES 2020 exhibition and attracted General Motors and Harley Davidson — the world automotive leaders.

Together with the client's team, we developed a demo system based on the Qualcomm SA8155 platform for Harley Davidson. For that demo, we combined images from two operating systems — Android (which is responsible for in-vehicle infotainment subsystem) and QNX (for cluster vehicle subsystem). We look forward to the successful continuation of development for Harley Davidson together with Alpine.

The solution contributed to starting negotiations with General Motors about signing a contract for Proof of Concept or POC. As a result, the customer managed to sign a contract with General Motors to develop a multimedia system for a robo-taxi.