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GENIVI Alliance Continues to Gain Traction With Cross Industry Momentum

Freescale Semiconductor, Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) and MontaVista Software have joined the Alliance. By joining the initial founding members of the GENIVI Alliance (BMW Group, Delphi, GM, Intel, Magneti-Marelli, PSA Peugeot Citroën, Visteon, and Wind River), these organizations are demonstrating their support for an open IVI platform and their commitment to expand the ecosystem for infotainment in the car.

The new members will contribute significant code and engineering resources for the continued development of the GENIVI Open Source Platform. In addition, the new members will offer automotive OEMs and Tier 1 manufacturers increased alternatives for key hardware and software components in the resulting commercial GENIVI-based products.

Member contributions will provide everyone in the Open Source IVI ecosystem a development platform to build compelling devices and applications resulting in a superior consumer experience. By pooling the interests and contributions of the members, the Alliance is planning to enable significant reductions in both development cost and time to market.

"GENIVI is the only automotive alliance where leading companies can jointly create an open reference platform that drives innovation and enables greater differentiation across the entire IVI ecosystem, and we welcome our new members that will expand the GENIVI supply chain," said Graham Smethurst, GENIVI president. "As top players in their respective fields, each understands the importance of an open-standards approach to in-vehicle infotainment, and their membership will serve as a key factor in shaping the future of GENIVI."

"MontaVista is joining the GENIVI Alliance to collaborate with other industry leaders in the development of an innovative, reliable, open source in-vehicle infotainment platform," said Dan Cauchy, senior director of marketing at MontaVista Software. "MontaVista brings over a decade of experience in working with the open source community and delivering commercialized embedded Linux solutions. We see the adoption of embedded-Linux by the automotive industry as a natural evolution of this flexible platform."

"The automotive infotainment market segment needs to find ways to accelerate the pace at which automakers can deliver new, attractive IVI devices to consumers," noted Steve Nelson, director, global automotive marketing at Freescale Semiconductor. "Freescale has joined GENIVI to align our leading automotive semiconductor technologies with the open platform approach that GENIVI has pioneered to help OEMs and their tier 1 suppliers speed IVI product development and delivery."

"The automotive market faces daunting challenges across the entire ecosystem as never before. More closely aligning the requirements of the consumer electronics and IVI markets in an open platform will help improve the attractiveness of new vehicles and increase the take rate for advanced vehicle options," said Brad Ballard, business development manager at TI. "By joining GENIVI, TI will offer IVI device manufacturers and their OEM customers advanced semiconductor technologies that, when integrated with the GENIVI reference platform, help close the gap between consumer electronics and automotive requirements."

At the Telematics Detroit 2009 Conference, the GENIVI Alliance will host a panel discussion featuring speakers from Delphi, General Motors Corp., Intel Corporation, Visteon Corp., and Wind River. The panel will take place June 2 from 2:00 - 2:30 pm at the Rock Financial Showplace, Novi, MI in the Sapphire Room. For more information, or to become a GENIVI member, visit www.genivi.org.

About GENIVI Alliance

GENIVI Alliance is a non-profit industry association whose mission is to drive the broad adoption of an In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) open source development platform. GENIVI will accomplish this by aligning requirements, delivering reference implementations, offering certification programs and fostering a vibrant open source IVI community. GENIVI's work will result in shortened development cycles, quicker time-to-market, and reduced costs for companies developing IVI equipment and software. GENIVI is headquartered in San Ramon, Calif. www.genivi.org.

For GENIVI Alliance
John Ehrig, 925-216-1552
jehrig@inventures.com