Date: 23rd Aug 2010

Wind River's embedded-software support for car infotainment apps

At the Embedded Systems Conference held recently in Bangalore, Wind River had displayed a car PC reference platform by using the hardware made by Compal of Taiwan. Praful Joshi, Business Development Manager, Wind River Systems, India says "We have created the complete software & hardware combination with interesting features."

Wind River is one of the founding member of GENIVI, an alliance focused on the development of in-vehicle infotainment products. The other founding members of GENIVI are BMW, Intel, GM, PSA, Delphi, Magneti-Marelli, and Visteon. Wind River is involved in optimizing the software stack and adding additional features, so that customers can take optimized version of the pack to put in the end product. The new version of GENIVI platform is based on MeeGo. "MeeGo is more suitable for car infotainment compared to Android or and such software" says Praful.

Venkatesh Kumaran, Country Manager- India of Wind River says,
"MeeGo is positioned more for infotainment, primarily a non-voice a non-terminal based (non-handset based) application, where as Android is primarily for mobile, there is huge play. I am not going to say it is limited but we also see Android getting into non-voice as well."

Wind River is now an Intel owned company. On the question of chances of Wind River leaning more towards Intel's chips, Venkatesh says his company will continue to exist as independent entity, Wind river will be vendor neutral and we continue to support non-Intel silicon vendors such as Freescale Semiconductor, TI etc..