A self adaptive interfacing concept for consumer device integration into automotive entities

Innovation in today's automobiles is mainly driven by electronic development. Standard infotainment devices delivered by car manufacturers offer services such as navigation, television, DVD, telephony and more. Especially in the last few years a trend can be recognized extending from these OEM specific solutions towards integration of consumer electronic devices such as iPods, cell phones or the like. An approach solely based on software adjustments might not be sufficient to solve the problem of car to mobile device communication. Reconfigurable hardware offers a unique possibility of adapting to a given problem in hardware as well as software structures. The feature of partial dynamic reconfiguration in particular can contribute significantly to the flexibility of the overall system. Any adaptation of the running system should be automatic and going unnoticed by the user. This contribution depicts an approach that utilizes reconfigurable hardware for connecting consumer electronics to an automobile. Detection of protocols, loading of appropriate hardware interfaces, as well as integration of offered or requested services are the essential steps presented in this paper.