The future of Android in vehicles

David Kleidermacher (Green Hills Software) and Brad Ballard (Texas Instruments Inc.)

Android was initially geared for smartphones and tablets but is quickly expanding into automotive and embedded markets. With its open-source flexibility, powerful content delivery system, and consumer device ubiquity, Android is a tempting choice for center stack designs, but presents significant challenges for designers. This article discusses these benefits and challenges, highlighting the importance of marrying in-vehicle infotainment bells and whistles with safety and security mechanisms.

Modern Automotive Electronics

One of the first computer systems in an automobile was the 1978 Cadillac Seville’s trip computer, run by a Motorola 6802 microprocessor with 128 bytes of RAM and two kilobytes of ROM. The printed source code could not have occupied more than a handful of pages. In contrast, today's automobiles contain massive aggregate compute power and millions of lines of code.

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