Overview
Automotive entertainment is known by several names in the industry:
Auto PCs, Telematics, Web on Wheels, Automotive Net Devices, Intelligent
Transmission Systems (ITS) and more.
One may question the motivation of companies aggressively invading
the car with entertainment electronics. The interest is because
over 100 million vehicles are registered in the U.S. every year.
Also, the average daily commute in the US is over 82 minutes, thus
providing huge opportunities for productivity while driving. Some
of the potential applications for these devices are in communication,
music-on-demand, real-time traffic information, and remote vehicle
maintenance.
Also this provides automotive manufacturers with the ability to
differentiate their products and a means to provide recurring revenues
from monthly services. This also promotes mobile commerce enabled
by GPS, advertisements and promotions based on location, and multimedia
specialized content transmission such as stocks, news, weather,
and sports.
Market Research
The first-generation auto PC products need improvements. Also,
there is a high cost of ownership and high up front costs and service
fees. There are also safety issues with the vehicle in motion. An
underdeveloped wireless infrastructure promotes slow data transmission
speeds and spotty cellular coverage. Also there are several product
substitutes such as cellular phones and an increase in cellular
services offered by PDAs and pagers (handhelds) with wireless access.
While several companies have formed partnerships to develop products,
this is seen to be a low-volume, high-end niche market for the next
several years.
Xilinx Solutions
The Xilinx Spartan-II programmable logic solutions offer the
flexibility to build products that can be reprogrammed in the field
at costs far below any programmable solution. Please view the presentation
to see how Xilinx solutions can help you build products for this
fast evolving market place.
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