Neusoft entered the field of automotive electronics through cooperation with Alpine in 1991. In the past 27 years, the company has solidified its technical strength, accumulated deep technical experience, and integrated the innovation capabilities of automotive electronics technology from three diverse geographic regions. Neusoft has established extensive cooperation with many of the world’s top automakers with rich experience in products and services and has signed framework contracts with a number of domestic and foreign automakers. A number of automotive electronic products have been planned, designed and developed under the cooperative development architecture.
Neusoft Automotive also relies on intelligent products and scenario-oriented functions to continuously and actively enhance the driving experience. The smart cockpit system connected to the cloud and deeply integrated with the Internet, an open intelligent connected ecosystem is built to provide a complete set of intelligent connected travel solutions.
Neusoft Automotive has made advanced planning in line with the trends in the context of the four transformations of automotive electronics (electric-driven, intelligent, connected and shared). Taking advantage of its years of experience with in-vehicle products and technological innovation, Neusoft has become the first Chinese company to develop a smart cockpit system and achieved mass production. Development of the smart cockpit system required overcoming significant challenges from the technology and from the industry.
First, comprehensive commercial solutions were costly and difficult to customize. This made it difficult to meet the project’s schedules. Second, virtualization technologies based on X86 platforms required both high performance and security of the GPU. Finally, the electronic cockpit system based on virtualization technology required integrating a great many technologies, and complex hardware and software architectures.
ACRN assists Neusoft Automotive in developing a smart cockpit system
In the early stage of the smart cockpit system R&D, Neusoft Automotive evaluated and selected the open source ACRN project from a number of virtualization solutions. Adopting ACRN meets the needs of Neusoft Automotive and automakers by:
First, ACRN meets the technical needs by adapting the virtualization technology to effectively isolate the dashboard and the central control operating system, by supporting rich IO sharing and the latest Android version;
Second, the use of ACRN makes it easy to expand the basic functionality of the electronic cockpit and to quickly respond to customer feedback.
Neusoft Automotive implements project design and continuously improves ACRN functions
In the course of this project Neusoft Automotive, with its years of experience in in-vehicle products and the technical knowhow, provided valuable expertise that resulted in significantly improved ACRN functionality. For instance:
- The support for GPIO control has been extended on ACRN, which better meets the development needs of automakers in real-world circumstances;
- Neusoft Automotive added support for DSI screens to the existing support for two HDMI screens, thus enabling ACRN to support three screens, as required to meet the needs of high-end smart cockpit systems;
- The support for PWM has been extended. This enables ACRN support for screen brightness adjustment and other related functions;
- The virtualization of support for sounds has been achieved on ACRN;
- An overall upgrade plan for the electronic cockpit system based on ACRN has been achieved;
As shown above, the project is a smart cockpit system developed together by Neusoft Automotive and Intel for automotive electronics manufacturers, using the Intel Apollo Lake SOC hardware solution and the ACRN software solution. In addition to the support for common functions such as full-LCD instruments and entertainment information systems, the project also supports 360-degree panorama view, DVR, fatigue driving detection, alarm and other functions, as well as mainstream third-party Android APPs.
“The smart cockpit system based on ACRN and the Intel platform is a key platform for mass production of Neusoft Automotive,” said Meng Lingjun, Vice President of Neusoft Corporation and GM of Neusoft Automotive, “Neusoft and Intel have jointly initiated the mass production project of ACRN-based smart cockpit system, under which the first product of mass production is believed to be successfully developed with the joint efforts of the two parties. Combining the strong technical strengths and innovative abilities of the two companies, they will gain greater market share in China.”
About ACRN
Released by the Linux Foundation in March 2018, ACRN is a flexible, lightweight reference hypervisor. It is built with real time and safety-criticality in mind, optimized to streamline embedded development through an open source platform. The project provides a reference design framework for industry leaders to build an open-source embedded hypervisor, which is especially suitable for the IoT field.
About Neusoft
Neusoft provides innovative information technology – enabled solutions and services to meet the demands arising from social transformation, to shape new life styles for individuals and to create values for the society. Through 27 years of practice and accumulation in the field of automotive electronics, Neusoft has become the world’s leading provider of in-vehicle infotainment systems. Neusoft is the first listed software company in China, and the first software company in China which pass the CMM5 Level 5 and CMMI (V1.2) Level 5 certifications. For more information, please visit: http://www.neusoft.com
