panasonic, which enjoys top-class share in the car...

Windows Automotive

Customer Solution Case Study

Overview

Country: Japan

Industry: Automotive

Customer Profile

A subsidiary of Panasonic Corpora-

tion dedicated to the development,

manufacture, and sales of on-board

multimedia products and which also

retails a variety of car electronics

products manufactured by the

Panasonic group.

Business Situation

The limits imposed by conventional

operating system in the support of

advanced functions and the provi-

sion of multiple functions led to the

evaluation of Windows Automotive

as an alternative.

Solution

Panasonic adopted Windows Auto-

motive as the operating system for

their "Strada" car navigation sys-

tems, so as to realize more efficient

development while being able to

quickly respond to market needs.

Benefits

Greatly improved their develop-

ment efficiency

Superior development productiv-

ity

Easy-to-use and compatibility

with other systems

Trouble-free development with

reliable technical support

Panasonic, which enjoys top-class share in the

car navigation market, has adopted Microsoft®

Windows® Automotive for its aftermarket prod-

ucts.

It has greatly improved their development efficiency

and has made their development processes capable

of responding to a wide range of market demands.

Car navigation systems have been widely adopted and are now com-

mon in commercial vehicles including taxis, as well as in passenger

cars. The design of the latest car navigation systems must, however,

be capable of supporting devices such as car audio, terrestrial digital

television, mobile telephones, and home electronics appliances, as

well as providing high-definition map displays and advanced naviga-

tion functions that are linked to the global positioning system (GPS),

all in shorter development period. In response to these demands,

Panasonic adopted Windows Automotive as the operating system for

their "Strada" car navigation systems.

Business Needs Car navigation systems were first developed

in Japan and it is said that about 80% of all

units sold on the world market (excluding

PND (Personal Navigation Devices)) are

manufactured by Japanese companies. In the

domestic market, however, Japanese manu-

facturers must be able to apply comprehen-

sive technological capabilities to provide

performance, functionality, quality, and so

forth, in order to be capable of responding

to diversifying users’ needs while always

keeping up with intense development com-

petition.

Even for Panasonic, the development of car

navigation systems first presented many diffi-

culties.

To compensate for the then-lacking digital

maps and the low-precision GPS perform-

ance, they developed software navigation

techniques such as one called map matching,

which serves to correctly locate the position

of a vehicle by comparing information on the

vehicle’s actual route and the map. In addi-

tion, they also needed to cope with hardware

-related problems such as changes in the

components resulting from temperature

changes, as well as physical failures caused

by dust or vibration.

Despite such difficult beginnings, they have

evolved their navigation systems to the point

where they lead the worldwide market with

its top-level precision navigation today.

Panasonic Corporation

Automotive Systems Company

Superb development

environment that

greatly reduces devel-

opment costs and

which enables the de-

velopment of products

with extra added

value.

“A car navigation system is a product in

which the software is a very important

element. So, the choice of the operating

system is an important point. But in

those days, our only options for embed-

ded operating systems were those dedi-

cated to relatively small-sized systems

such as μITRON, which offered a very

limited set of functions” (Mr. Tanaka).

μITRON is a real-time operating system

developed through cooperation be-

tween industry and academia. Its specifi-

cations are open and, because of its cost

advantages, many manufacturers in a

wide range of industries adopted it as

an embedded operating system. With

the advance of related technologies,

however, the development of car navi-

gation systems has seen waves of per-

formance increases and functional im-

provements.

“From the latter half of the 1990s, we

had to support features that were not

originally oriented to navigation sys-

tems, such as higher-quality displays

and additional information like VICS

(Vehicle Information and Communica-

tion System), and then in the 2000s, the

Internet and mobile phones" said Mr.

Obuchi, a member of the Domestic

Sales Business Unit of Panasonic Corpo-

ration Automotive Systems Company.

Solution μITRON, which they had been using, is a

compact operating system that provides

a satisfactory processing speed, but it

also presented a problem in that they

had to create their own development

tools and development environments. In

addition, the operating system offered

poor support of multimedia such as

music and imaging, so they had to de-

velop middleware and applications, as

well as design screens themselves.

For example, most recent car navigation

systems employ a touch-panel for better

operability. However, the touch-panel

user interface forces the user to make

selections one by one, so the number of

screens inevitably increases. In the past,

to cope with increased program devel-

opment due to these changes in the

user interface, and to support communi-

cation features such as internet and

mobile phones, as well as to support

digital television, it was necessary to

continue to develop individual software

applications.

Any increase in the number of develop-

ment man-hours influences the time

required for development. In particular,

in the intense market for aftermarket car

navigation products, the shortening of

the development period is an important

issue. In addition to reducing the devel-

opment period, it is also necessary to

reduce the number of development

man-hours in order to improve techno-

logical capabilities and provide support

for multifunctional capabilities in the

commercial market despite intense

competition. Thus, with the ultimate

goal of achieving more efficient devel-

opment, we started considering migra-

tion to Windows Automotive in 2005.

“We had been considering introduction

of Windows ever since the release of

Windows CE Automotive, but we could

not bring ourselves to adopt it because

of problems with the boot-up time, re-

sponse time, memory restrictions, and

so forth. However, the release of Win-

dows Automotive offered greatly im-

proved performance and an attractive

development environment, so we evalu-

ated whether we could introduce it from

a practical perspective. For us, one of

the most important matters was

whether the development environment

offered sufficient user interface imple-

mentation tools and analysis support

tools” (Mr. Tanaka).

Mr. Tanaka

Domestic Sales Business Unit,



Easy-to-use and com-

patible with other sys-

tems and data types

to fully exploit the ad-

vantages of the Win-

dows platform.

Up until then, the company had to cre-

ate their own program development

tools and modules for multimedia im-

age processing, communication proc-

essing and so forth, but Windows Auto-

motive incorporates these as standard,

thus realizing a huge reduction in gen-

eral development man-hours.

This reduction in man-hours allows us to

apply more manpower to the develop-

ment of higher performance and multi-

function capabilities. This is also linked

to the technological competitiveness

required for aftermarket products, too.

At the beginning of the development

environment migration from μITRON,

the number of man-hours increased

temporarily, but a large cost reduction

was ultimately expected. This was how

Panasonic’s aftermarket products de-

partment decided to adopt Windows

Automotive in 2006 and immediately

started using it for practical product

development.

Benefits/Results For embedded products, migration of

the platform is not easy. This is even

truer if the system has been used for a

long time. In spite of difficulty of the

task, however, migration to Windows

Automotive requires very little time and

improves the development efficiency,

allowing the time saved to be applied to

technology support, user support, and

other development for adding value to

the aftermarket products. Thus, manu-

facturers can offer products that are

technically superior and more attractive

in the highly competitive market for car

navigation systems.

Superb development environ-

ment The Windows Automotive platform is

designed for on-board infotainment

systems. A particularly salient point is

that Microsoft has incorporated devel-

opment tools for car navigation systems.

These development tools are based on

Windows CE 5.0 Platform Builder, which

provides an integrated development

environment equivalent to that of Mi-

crosoft Visual Studio®. In addition, inter-

faces, development tools, and develop-

ment guidelines specifically for Windows

Automotive are available, thus providing

a full-featured and efficient develop-

ment environment.

In the case of car navigation systems, for

example, turning off the engine causes

the power supply to the system to be

suddenly cut off, making it difficult to

design a more convenient power-off

arrangement. Windows Automotive,

however, provides system power-off

functions that have been optimized for

on-board infotainment systems, thus

freeing manufacturers from the need to

develop this aspect of their programs.

Moreover, to enable intercommunica-

tion with mobile phones, Windows

Automotive ships with communication

modules, interfaces, and so forth. So,

manufacturers can concentrate on de-

velopment, making sure that they con-

form to prescribed specifications, and

don’t have to develop these programs.

Windows Automotive lets designers who

are not programmers directly develop

user interfaces on a PC. They can

achieve this by making use of the tools

provided by Windows Automotive with-

out developing in-house tools. Conse-

quently, they can spend more time on

improving user interfaces and operabil-

ity, and can improve the competitive-

ness and technological level of the com-

pany’s products.

High processing speeds

The requirement for high-speed proc-

essing is another issue specific to car

navigation systems, so one major ad-

vantage of Windows Automotive is that

it provides a level of performance

equivalent to μITRON. In Windows

Automotive, boot-up and response

Mr. Sugauchi




Trouble-free develop-

ment was realized in

spite of migrating to a

new system, which is

normally a challenging

task. Development

productivity with Win-

dows Automotive is

exceptionally high.

times are as short as they can be, so its

specifications are safely applicable to on

-board infotainment systems that de-

mand secure, high-speed processing

while also offering high levels of func-

tionality.

To attain high processing speeds, the

management of system resources such

as memory usage and CPU run time is

also an important factor. Windows

Automotive ships with a set of system

optimization tools called Automotive

System Tools, which allow developers to

quickly understand an entire system, so

that they can easily perform system tun-

ing to achieve higher speeds, as well as

identifying problem processes.

To handle failures, μITRON required the

development of logging programs, but

Windows Automotive not only accu-

rately logs operations but also ensures

that operational information remains in

memory even if the system goes down,

which greatly aids in fault analysis.

“Because we were using the platform for

the first time, we were anxious about

many different aspects, but the rapid

support provided by Microsoft was ex-

tremely helpful. They were always there

to provide us with answers, so if we ever

hit a problem, we knew that we could

rely on them for support” (Mr. Obuchi).

For Panasonic, the good quality of the

development environment, as well as

the excellent post-introduction support

that is provided by Microsoft, greatly

contributed to the decision to migrate

to Windows Automotive. As develop-

ment periods are required to be shorter,

quick support is absolutely essential,

even when good development tools are

available. From this aspect, also, Win-

dows Automotive has a qualifying score.

Migration of development from

servers to PCs

Panasonic currently develops car navi-

gation systems on servers and actual

hardware, but they are examining their

migration to development on PCs in the

future.

“Now that we have migrated to the

Windows platform, we are also planning

to migrate our development work,

which is currently done using actual

hardware, to Windows PCs. We are ex-

amining how the verification time can

be reduced by performing hardware

verification on PCs, so that we don’t

have to build so many prototypes” (Mr.

Tanaka).

Car navigation systems require the con-

current development of software and

hardware, so the development time

cannot be shortened simply by stream-

lining the software development. To

increase the overall development effi-

ciency, therefore, we must also improve

the efficiency of the hardware-related

development. Verification on a PC in-

volves emulating the hardware on the

PC and running the developed pro-

grams on the emulated hardware. With

Windows Automotive, which is a Win-

dows platform, this would be easier to

realize.

© 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRAN-TIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIES, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corpo-

ration in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published in 2009

Mr. Obuchi




The CN-HX1000D became Panasonic’s first aftermar-

ket product to incorporate Windows Automotive

panasonic, which enjoys top-class share in the car...

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