Joel Seely, Altera Corporation
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The programmable supercomputer on wheels
Total costs associated with sophisticated automotive electronics systems are rising. While automotive electronics now account for 22 percent of a vehicle's cost, industry analysts project that this figure will increase to at least 40 percent by 2010. As these systems continue to evolve with rapidly changing requirements, manufacturers strive for higher levels of innovation with smaller, cheaper, and more flexible builds to win the cost and time-to-market battles. Under the current scenario where audio, video, and radar signal processing require more computational power in the typical automobile, FPGAs can meet these more demanding flexibility and processing requirements while also delivering reduced system cost.
