Spansion Expands Traveo™ Family for Automotive with HMI Technologies and Embedded 3D Graphics Engine

First Integrated Solution of Spansion MCU and HyperBus™Memory Interface Brings the Luxury Vehicle Experience to the Everyday Car

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Spansion Inc.

Oct 02, 2014, 07:00 ET

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct. 2, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Spansion Inc. (NYSE: CODE), a global leader in embedded systems solutions, today introduced the latest member of its Spansion® Traveo™ microcontroller family aimed at rich human machine interfaces (HMI) in automotive dashboards. For the first time, Spansion is integrating its breakthrough HyperBus™ interface with its ARM® Cortex®-R5-based embedded Traveo MCU, enabling seamless connections with HyperBus memories, including Spansion HyperFlash™ memory, to provide customers design simplification and faster performance in automotive systems.

The latest Traveo family delivers state-of-the-art 2D and 3D graphics, which Spansion has optimized to bring sophisticated and automotive specific graphics functions into the car without increased power and BOM requirements. As the first 3D-capable ARM Cortex-R5 cluster MCU, Spansion's graphics engine provides greater memory savings, increased safety features and rich image capabilities, without the need for external video RAM. These, in turn, help manufacturers take advantage of lower overall system costs to proliferate the advanced driver experience previously reserved for luxury automotive brands.

"The Spansion Traveo family with 2D and 3D graphics further strengthens the company's position as a leading provider of integrated system-solutions for the automotive segment," said Dr. Saied Tehrani, senior vice president of Spansion's MCU Business. "Automotive systems are getting more complex as new features are added to improve the user experience and safety in cars. Significant amounts of processing power and new protocols are required to process information, evaluate and make decisions. Our Traveo family is unique in delivering a scalable, high-performance system at lower costs, power and footprint, allowing our customers to bring visually rich instrument clusters and heads up displays to the everyday car."

Spansion is launching two variations of the Traveo graphics solutions: the S6J324C series enables 2D graphics while the S6J326C variant supports both 2D and 3D graphics. Both series support the Spansion HyperBus interface. The scalable solution offers easy upgrade paths from 2D to 3D. In addition to the strong graphics feature-set, the solution includes enhanced and next-generation connectivity, supporting a wide range of communications protocols, including CAN-FD and Ethernet AVB, as well as advanced graphics interfaces such as LVDS PHY and RSDS. It also contains extensive multimedia support with a cutting-edge sound system combining 16-bit audio DAC and multi-channel mixer. Additionally, all device variants have the universal footprint with consistent packaging and pin-outs, enabling users to migrate from one device to another without having to alter board layouts, quickening time to market.  

"Historically, the instrument cluster has presented the driver with mission critical dials and gauges, but the evolution of the automotive cockpit is such that that may no longer be enough," said Tom Hackenberg, Automotive Embedded Processors Principal Analyst at IHS Technology. "OEMs that wish to provide a more engaging user-experience are challenged with blending the right level of visual appeal without adding driver distraction; this trend is leading OEMs to integrate camera feeds or advanced graphics directly into the instrument cluster."

Hackenberg added, "The challenge is that ASIL compliant microcontrollers have traditionally lacked the graphics processing and memory to reproduce video or remarkable graphics, and the large market of high-performance graphically enhanced SoCs have often been too costly in terms of price and/or certification challenges. Rather than replacing the microcontroller, a few processor suppliers are embracing this challenge by evolving the microcontroller to support graphics. One recent example is the latest member of the Traveo™ family of MCUs from Spansion which not only adds a 2D or 3D graphics accelerator, but also includes Spansion's recent Hyperbus™ interface as the 'secret sauce' for fast flash memory utilization to support the growing demand for memory-intensive graphics."

Availability
The S6J324C series with 2D graphics will be sampling in the fourth quarter.
The S6J326C series with 2D and 3D graphics will be sampling in the fourth quarter.

About Spansion Traveo™ Family of 32-bit ARM® Cortex-R5® Core based Microcontrollers
The Spansion Traveo™ microcontrollers are based on the ARM® Cortex®-R5 core and deliver high performance, enhanced human machine interfaces, high-security and advanced networking protocols tailored for a broad range of automotive applications such as electrification, body electronics, battery management, automotive cluster displays, HVAC and ADAS.

Resources:

About Spansion

Spansion (NYSE: CODE) is a global leader in embedded systems solutions. Spansion's flash memory, microcontrollers, analog and mixed-signal products drive the development of faster, intelligent, secure and energy efficient electronics. Spansion is at the heart of electronics systems, connecting, controlling, storing and powering everything from automotive electronics and industrial systems to the highly interactive and immersive consumer devices that are enriching people's daily lives. For more information, visit http://www.spansion.com   

Spansion®, the Spansion logo, MirrorBit®, HyperBus, HyperFlash, Traveo and combinations thereof, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Spansion LLC in the United States and other countries. Other names used are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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SOURCE Spansion Inc.

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