According to Atmel, the FlexRay is a new automotive network communications protocol under development by the FlexRay Consortium. The company will demonstrate it at the FlexRay day conference held in Stuttgart, Germany, implementing in-vehicle networking with X-by-wire drive, steer and brake functions.
The company said that the evaluation environment is a 32-bit microcontroller based on its AVR32 architecture, which includes hardware LIN IP, a dual CAN IP, an Ethernet MAC and a set of general purpose peripherals. This environment also includes the AVR32 development tool set, a FlexRay stack, a FlexRay configuration tool and a network analyzer.
It is designed to provide distributed control for advanced automotive applications and its dual-channel architecture offers system-wide redundancy that meets the requirements of safety systems. It has a 10 Mbps throughput per channel and the FlexRay system can also be employed as a vehicle-wide network backbone.
With this environment, Atmel can now provide to its customer a complete FlexRay evaluation platform, said Philippe Malecha, automotive microcontroller strategic marketing director at Atmel. This movement to FlexRay will significantly extend our existing microcontroller offering covering CAN and LIN control, providing to our customers a broad range of solutions for their future vehicle designs.
The company said that the Atmel FlexRay evaluation platform is available to customers upon request and samples of the AVR32 FlexRay products will be available in the second half of 2008.
Source: ComputerWire daily updates
