K2L Competencies

Automotive Background

Car manufacturers are identifying an increase in consumer demand for multimedia services (infotainment) and graphical user interfaces (GUI) inside their vehicles. To address this demand, advanced MMI products are being developed to provide the driver with easy to use and comfortable interfaces to control the sophisticated systems and manage an increased flow of information in advanced vehicles, especially those in the high-end market segment. Features such as satellite navigation systems with voice guidance and map display, CD and DVD players, digital TV tuners, GSM phones, electronic cruise-control systems and extended comfort control capabilities (climate system, driver seat position, "personalization", mirror control, rear-view camera control) are becoming more common in many vehicles. The typical driver can be easily overwhelmed by all these integrated systems and is rarely able to use them efficiently without some form of additional guidance. To address this need, the automotive industry has been developing integrated electronic assistance systems and easy to use menu structures to allow the intuitive operation of these vehicles without requiring the extensive study of an operation manual.

Networks

Today's cars and trucks implement several on-board networks to support these enhanced features. BMW, for instance, uses several optical (MOST®) and DC coupled (CAN and FlexRay™) bus systems in their 7-series of vehicles. Optical rings are used primarily for entertainment systems and video applications such as a DVD player and rear view camera system. DC coupled busessupport body control and safety systems.

Hardware Platforms

Although K2L primarily provides solutions for embedded systems, its engineering team takes advantage of the latest development resources and hardware platforms. Since 4-bit controllers and assembler programming are rarely used for development of complex systems any longer, the company's applications are based on modern 32-bit platform architectures with 500kB of ROM and up to some MB of RAM space. The operation frequencies of target platforms are between 4 to 40 MHz, depending on design practically and the need to meet specified EMC constraints or real-time performance requirements. One of the most important design goals is low power consumption.

Operating Systems

For small real time systems, OSEK is used as the standard operating system. More advanced solutions use CMX®, VxWorks® and Microsoft WindowsCE® and QNX®, and Microsoft Windows® is used for simulation and the development of PC applications. Several libraries for graphical applications are also used, including proprietary widget libraries.

Programming Languages

K2L has extensive experience with a number of programming languages. C continues to be the primary language used for embedded software development, but the use of C++ is also increasing next to Java (Android). PC-based tools use C# and VB. The processing of input data and converting it into different output formats is done in XML, XSLT and other related languages. To ensure high productivity and state-of-the-art development, .NET is used for K2L tools and programming interfaces. XHTML, CSS and JScript are used to easily share reports.

Design and Architecture

Object oriented design is commonly used to model reusable, modular system designs. The standard language for architectural descriptions is the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Design patterns (Gamma, Helm, Johnson) are used as templates to shorten design procedures.