Resource Tag: Cluster

Altia ON: 2023 Piaggio MP3

Posted on by Cheryl Falk

Motorcycle and motorbike companies such as Harley-Davidson, Kawasaki, Piaggio and Triumph trust Altia software to drive the graphics of their most advanced multi-functional displays. Here is a shining example of the safety, style and performance that Altia can deliver—the Piaggio MP3.

This is the most advanced and luxurious model ever produced by Piaggio, the pioneer and leader of the three-wheeler segment. This three-wheeler features a 7-inch TFT display, the largest display in its category. This display functions as the control and connection center for Piaggio’s MIA connectivity system, which allows drivers to access calls, manage playlists and use GPS. Drivers can also customize the display according to their needs and preferences.

Using the instrument cluster, which is clearly inspired by high class cars on the road, riders can manage numerous features including navigation, connectivity and, on the 530 hpe Exclusive version, also the engine maps (Comfort, Eco and Sport) and cruise control, as well as clearly displaying the images of the rear camera while reversing (exclusive to this equipment).

Take a ride on a Piaggio MP3 with this YouTuber to see this gorgeous display in action!

The TFT also integrates the innovative ARAS (Advanced Rider Assistance System) devices, which are based on a 4D imaging radar technology developed by Piaggio Fast Forward. The ARAS devices include the BLIS® (Blind Spot Information System) and the LCDAS (Lane Change Decision Aid System), which alert drivers to fast-approaching vehicles and help them avoid collisions. These devices are exclusive to the Piaggio MP3 and make it the first scooter to be equipped with such advanced safety systems.

Delivering innovative UX for embedded displays is Altia’s specialty. Designed into over 100 million cars, trucks, SUVs, motorcycles, medical devices, home appliances and more, we offer production-proven software and services for getting pixel-perfect graphics to production.

Visit www.altia.com/get-started. Let’s get your next GUI on the road together!

Altia: The Complete HMI Platform for Automotive Cockpit Displays

Posted on by Cheryl Falk

As the automotive industry moves closer and closer to fully autonomous, even lower end vehicles are evolving into rolling computers—with ever-increasing interconnectivity and complexity in the vehicle cockpit. Car buyers now expect to be connected to the outside world—and OEMs are responding to their requirements. It is estimated that by 2030, 95% of all new vehicles will incorporate intermediate or advanced infotainment, telematics and V2X capabilities to communicate between vehicles, users and infrastructure.

With these dramatic shifts in technologies from more mechanical and analog controls to those that are partially or fully digital, automotive OEMs are challenged with anticipating how customers interact with their vehicles, namely through the human-machine interface (HMI).

The HMI acts as a hub of the wheel for the vehicle cockpit’s connected user experience, integrating the spokes that provide information to the driver while sending commands to the various systems both inside and outside the car. The considerable shift toward electrification and autonomous vehicles has resulted in new regulatory requirements. These requirements have compelled OEMs and suppliers to invest more R&D into user interface hardware and software lifecycles and integration, whether their digital cockpits include a multitude of dedicated displays in a single vehicle to just a single in-dash touchscreen.

But the simplicity of a well-architected UI masks great complexity. Cockpit software design includes many considerations, such as how to integrate multiple compute domains and vehicle applications across varying operating systems. Customers have grown accustomed to smartphones being at their side—so how can OEMs keep them connected to their communication and entertainment while adhering to regulations for driver safety and attention? How can OEMs maintain brand continuity between native HMI screens, multiple connectivity solutions and those of the passengers’ personal devices? This is a complex challenge encompassing a vast number of varying requirements, especially given the increase in autonomy. OEMs can embrace these challenges by leveraging a production-proven platform to bring this all together efficiently.

Meeting OEM Challenges with Proven Innovation

Altia delivers a single, comprehensive platform to meet OEM’s cockpit software challenges and the needs and expectations of their customers. They provide a complete end-to-end cockpit software solution for OEMs by combining the best design tools, advanced technology, customization capabilities and expertise within one unified platform.

Altia has helped some of the largest OEMs create custom HMIs in various vehicles as well as develop and deploy their entire software stack—from sedans, SUVs, semis and motorcycles to electric construction-agriculture equipment and everything in between. The integration of Altia’s powerful features and hardware flexibility in over 100 million production vehicles on the road have been shaping the industry. Altia’s software solution is at the heart of over 375 vehicle dashboards for the upcoming generation.

A Comprehensive Collection of Tools and Expert Service

Altia’s cockpit software platform sets the standard for designing, developing and deploying innovative, first-class automotive user experience. The platform enables display design and deployment on any screen within a car, including instrument clusters, HUDs, infotainment displays, passenger displays and rear passenger entertainment systems. No matter how grand and challenging your vision is, Altia can enable a seamless look and feel in your vehicle cockpits to provide an immersive experience that is representative of the brands across your fleet of vehicles. By reusing the core of your work, Altia enables you to keep design cost-efficient while enabling endless opportunities to differentiate. Providing the tools and expert support you need to bring your UI from concept to production quickly and efficiently, Altia’s HMI development platform saves time and reduces production costs.

Altia Advantages for Automotive

  • Hypervisor operations — HMI cockpit operates on both sides of your hypervisor
  • Code generation — Quick conversion of HMI prototypes and graphics to deployable graphics code across a wide range of hardware
  • Integration and display management — Guidance on how to manage and integrate cockpit real estate to create cohesive and intuitive signature UIs for customers while maintaining brand identity
  • Head-up display expertise — Best-in-class HUDs integration to show system information and advanced driver-assist system (ADAS) warnings to keep drivers’ eyes on the road
  • Automated testing solutions — Reduction in time-to-market HMI testing costs, minimizes human error

Integrations

Altia’s cockpit HMI platform can seamlessly integrate the following services and applications into your displays:

  • Android Auto and Apple CarPlay
  • Third-party mapping programs
  • ADAS
  • Media players
  • Telematics units
  • Automotive infrastructure integrations via Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X)

Altia Software Tools and Services Support Every Step of Your HMI Process

With the increasing complexity in the automotive world and increasing demand for OEMs to pull user experience and data ownership in-house, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with an approach to managing it all. Altia is here to bring all the pieces together and help OEMs to realize their automotive user experience goals. Altia guides OEMs through designing, developing and deploying their custom automotive cockpits.

Altia’s complete automotive software platform supports every step of the development process, from concept design through delivery. Altia automotive solutions enable OEMs to meet their digital cockpit goals today and in the future. Altia understands these system complexities and has the proven tools to help you with your automotive software challenges.

Ready to start your automotive cockpit development journey? Altia delivers the expertise, software and services to guide you throughout the process to meet your needs and realize your goals. We would love to hear about your project and how we can help you get it on the road.

Visit www.altia.com/get-started.

Altia ON: 2025 Cadillac ESCALADE IQ

Posted on by Cheryl Falk

The 2025 Cadillac Escalade IQ is an innovative electric SUV that will combine top-tier luxury with cutting-edge technology. GM relies on Altia for getting its most advanced, intuitive graphics into production – and this cutting-edge redesign of Cadillac’s flagship turned EV will definitely deliver. 

Here’s what we’re most excited about in the Escalade IQ. 

The cockpit interface is incredibly user-friendly, with intuitive menus and rapid responses. Multi-tasking is a breeze, allowing drivers to simultaneously view navigation, play music and monitor vehicle stats without switching screens. Voice recognition, augmented reality navigation and integration with popular apps ensure that drivers are safe, comfortable and connected.

The dash is composed of a sprawling, curved pillar-to-pillar 55″ total diagonal LED display powered by a Snapdragon Cockpit platform from Qualcomm Technologies. Spanning the entire front row, it provides a stunning visual experience for driver and passenger. This massive display is segmented to serve the different needs of front seat passengers—with 35″ dedicated to the driver and 20″ dedicated to the passenger. The passenger side of the display is polarized—making it less visible to the driver thus reducing distraction and clearing the regulatory hurdle that will let passengers stream video or surf the internet while the electric Escalade is on the move. The display can be customized with different themes, widgets and apps, including voice-controlled services like Google Assistant, Google Maps and Google Play.

Beneath the 55″ screen combination sits an 11″ touchscreen where driver and passenger can access five-zone climate controls, ambient lighting and even the doors (if equipped with the power open-and-close feature).

That cool, connected experience of the Cadillac Escalade IQ extends to the back seat. For models with the Executive Seating package, second-row passengers get two 12.6″ personal screens plus a rear command center screen to control comfort, lighting and more.

Designing, developing and deploying this kind of brand-defining innovation in cockpit displays is exactly what Altia does. We work with automotive OEMs and Tier 1s all over the world—including General Motors—to deliver first class cockpit experiences for production vehicles. Let us help you with your next generation production program. Visit www.altia.com/get-started today.

Altia and Green Hills INTEGRITY for Automotive Cockpit Applications

Posted on by Cheryl Falk

Altia is proud to partner with Green Hills Software for integrated cockpit applications like this one demonstrated with #GreenHills #INTEGRITY #RTOS, #Android and #Qualcomm. Altia’s #HMI development solutions enable rich 2D and 3D graphics, functional safety and optimized graphics code for multiple display, multi-OS systems.

Check out this video tour of Altia in action with Green Hills at CES 2023!

Learn more about Altia’s graphical user interface platform for production automotive applications: https://altia.com/automotive/.

Top Automaker Takes Control of Their Cluster Designs Using Altia HMI Software

Easy-to-Use Altia HMI Design and Development Environment Gives OEM New Freedom to Innovate

Global automotive companies understand how important vision is to vehicle design. It is a major challenge, in such a complex industry, to maintain a designer’s original vision through the hundreds of steps between concept and final product. Their success in overcoming these obstacles, in partnership with Altia, is a transformative step for them. Other OEMs across the automotive industry can benefit from following a similar path.

Lost in Translation

Not long ago, a global automotive customer spoke with Altia about their experiences designing digital instrument clusters for the company’s vehicles. Their design staff explained their difficulties maintaining the integrity of their design ideas.

“Each Tier One cluster supplier has their own software package it uses for design implementation. Therefore, each project is one more new opportunity for a design to be muddied or for software bugs to be introduced,” explained Jeff Stewart, Altia Director of Global Sales Engineering. “The OEM’s designers
have no way to provide a prototype that is suitable for development. They cannot even test their designs in a production setting to determine their viability for a particular microprocessor target.”

Because this automaker works with multiple cluster makers, their team must face these kinds of issues repeatedly. “Every time a new cluster is begun, the OEM’s design team is facing a new set of implementation issues. They are continually reinventing the wheel,” he said.

Putting Design Control in OEM Hands

Having worked with countless engineers around the world, Altia had the answers for this OEM’s engineers in Altia Design, the company’s HMI design/editing package, and DeepScreen, Altia’s code generator.

“We demonstrated to the design team that with Altia Design, they can design, test and specify their instrument cluster ideas within their design studio before they ever approach the supplier. That way the Tier One can directly use the generated code in their implementation. With Altia Design, our OEM customers can retain direct control over their vision for the final product,” said Michael Hill, Altia Vice President of Engineering.

Yet Altia was able to go further. “We said, ‘Look, because you own the implementation, you have control over pricing because the software has been generated and tested internally. You can assure your Tier One that the design will run on hardware of a known cost,’” Hill continued. “Altia Design and DeepScreen give auto companies ownership over the entire construction process.”

At the time, the OEM was in the middle of conversations with one of their suppliers who had experience with a competing HMI software package. They decided to do a performance test on the two design environments.

“We were tasked with showing we could run a certain graphics type on near-production hardware, and that we could deliver the same performance or better,” Stewart noted. “Next we had to show that our generated code was of a certain size. Finally, we had to meet certain speed and footprint parameters.”

As subsequent analysis showed, Altia DeepScreen, working in tandem with Altia Design, exceeded the performance requirements of the Tier One platform.

Unified Design-to-Code

The automaker’s design team liked the ability to do designs in Altia Design without having to learn code, as was necessary with the competing design package.

“The people on the OEM’s design team come from a mixture of disciplines. Some are more comfortable with the graphics side, while others are more software focused, so the ability for everyone to sit at the same table and use Altia Design to come up with a solution was a big deal,” observed Stewart.

Once specified in Altia Design, the concept goes directly into DeepScreen to generate production-grade code that is deployable onto the final hardware as a finished product. The result is hardened software that a Tier One can directly use in an implementation.

“Once our head-to-head test was done, the OEM was convinced,” Hill stated. “They began specifying in their requests for proposals that Altia was the required design environment.”

Huge Time Savings

As automotive companies well know, the design cycle for cluster components can run to two years or more. This OEM’s experience with Altia Design and DeepScreen significantly changed the game. Once their Altia platforms were in place, the design team was able to shrink their design-to-handoff cycle to their Tier One to just three months.

“This was the first time that this particular automotive company was able to produce an HMI in-house,” said Stewart. “Prior to that, it was only producing documentation or requirements for their HMIs. With Altia, the teams were able to verify that the look-and-feel was exactly what they wanted before the concept ever went out the door.”

Through their use of Altia, this OEM can define every aspect of their cluster designs, from the concept through the bill of materials. Altia software helps to improve efficiency in the cluster development process. Altia’s ease-of-use and strong feature set enable OEMs to fully define vehicle HMI solutions implement those solutions dependably.

“For an OEM, nothing is more valuable than to maintain control of the design process,” Hill said. “With Altia, there are no more surprises.”

Denso and Altia Team Up to Win Clusters Year After Year

Denso International America (DIAM), one of the world’s largest suppliers of automotive technology and componentry, provides infotainment and safety systems, HMIs and HUDs for vehicles all over the world. The DIAM team needed an HMI development solution that would auto-generate code, saving them time and cost over their traditional hand-coding process. They chose Altia! Not only does Altia DeepScreen generate high quality graphics code, but DeepScreen code generation targets are architected to get as much power out of whatever processor DIAM selected for their project – making thereby allowing DIAM to deliver powerful graphics on low-cost hardware.

Additionally, DIAM looks to Altia as a powerful extension to their team. From product support to implementation of new features to input into product roadmap, Altia and DIAM have established a powerful partnership that has contributed to DIAM’s success – including deploying their graphics in one of the most important and best-selling vehicles in North America.

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