Facing in-car infotainment design challenges

Keywords: in-car infotainment electronics  infotainment design  automotive entertainment electronics 

The new term "infotainment" describes the complete ecosystem of electronic devices for information and entertainment inside the automobile. Audio and video devices, as well as navigation systems and telematics, are merging into single, fully-integrated systems, creating new challenges for system designers.

Much of the responsibility for the quality of the infotainment system rests with the in-car radio. Along with the reception of real-time audio and video programming, the playback of stored content also adds to the complexity of an in-dash receiver. Bulky CD drives, which require quite a bit of space, have long been considered a standard feature in cars. However, accommodations for flash memory in the form of SD cards and memory sticks is also becoming quite common, supporting the trend in infotainment to integrate external devices. In addition, customers now expect high-end car entertainment systems to provide interfaces and support for phones, A/V players and external memory of any kind. The industry-standard USB interface is making great market headway, while a growing number of infotainment systems also integrate Bluetooth and WLAN connections.

Apart from physical connections, the radio head unit also has to offer audio decoding capabilities, drivers and a suitable user interface for media playback/integration. All of these functions result in complicated car infotainment systems and sub-systems that require significant software and hardware effort.

Despite all of these new features, automotive entertainment still centres on the traditional AM/FM receiver. Thanks to technological breakthroughs such as new ICs, filters, amplifiers and antenna designs, sound quality has improved with each new generation of receiver. Broadcasting technology itself has also been upgraded through the Radio Data System (RDS) extension, which offers specialised features for mobile receivers.

In comparison to analogue radio, terrestrial digital broadcasting systems, such as DAB, HD-Radio, Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM), and satellite radio, offer a suite of attractive advantages, although they are still striving to achieve mainstream customer awareness and high-volume market success. Each of these digital standards requires very specific hardware to receive and decode the audio data.

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