Fujitsu Microelectronics Asia Pte Ltd (FMAL) today announced the development and launch of a new microcontroller driver for its MB91460 Series of high-performance 32-bit automotive microcontrollers.

Jointly developed with Elektrobit Corporation of Finland, the new driver is compatible with Release 2.1 of AUTOSAR (*1), the open software architecture for automobiles from the AUTOSAR automotive software standards consortium.

The new microcontroller driver will be available from Fujitsu Microelectronics and Elektrobit from July 18, 2008. When used with Fujitsu Microelectronics’ microcontrollers, this new driver will offer customers a greater degree of code reusability for automotive onboard applications already developed, and greater efficiency when developing automotive software.

The new microcontroller driver will be exhibited as part of an automotive cockpit product demonstration at Automotive Technology (AT) International 2008, to be held from July 23 to July 25 at Makuhari Messe, near Tokyo.

As electronic control technology becomes more pervasive and the number of electronic components increase, the software that controls these components is becoming more complex and larger, leading to mounting costs for manufacturers of vehicles and electronic control units (ECUs).

AUTOSAR is a standards consortium for automotive onboard systems software, dedicated to addressing this problem - by creating a common specification for onboard software, the same software can be re-used regardless of the microcontroller it is running on. The AUTOSAR Release 2.1 specification standard was recently published and encompasses FlexRay (*2), the next-generation in-vehicle networking standard.

Fujitsu Microelectronics became a premium member of the AUTOSAR organization in 2005 and has taken an active role in the development of onboard microcontrollers. In 2007, the company formed a strategic partnership with Elektrobit, a leading developer of software for automotive onboard systems. The companies worked together to develop a version of Elektrobit’s “EB tresos” software for Fujitsu Microelectronics’ MB91460 Series of microcontrollers, with both companies agreeing to distribute an AUTOSAR-compatible driver.

In accordance with this agreement, Fujitsu Microelectronics and Elektrobit jointly developed two drivers compatible with AUTOSAR 2.1: one for the dashboard-control microcontroller (*3) MB91F467DA, and one for the FlexRay 2.1 microcontroller, MB91F465XA. Both drivers are available as of July 2008. The AUTOSAR Release 2.1 now encompasses FlexRay, so customers using Fujitsu Microelectronics’ microcontrollers and the new driver developed with Elektrobit can efficiently develop applications that take advantage of FlexRay.

Based on its strategic partnership agreement with Elektrobit, Fujitsu Microelectronics will continue to promptly provide drivers compatible with the latest upgrades to the AUTOSAR standards for the mid- to long-term future.

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About Fujitsu Microelectronics Asia Pte Ltd

Fujitsu Microelectronics Asia Pte Ltd was established as the Asia Pacific Headquarters of Fujitsu Limited Electronic Devices Group in 1986. It provides support, sales and marketing of semiconductors and electronic devices to the Asia Pacific region, including India and Oceania. Fujitsu Microelectronics Asia offers a wide and varied product range like ASIC, ASSPs, Microcontrollers / Microprocessors (FR-V), System Memory (Flash Memory / FRAM / FCRAM) and System LSIs (DVD MPEG Source Decoders / MPEG –2 Encoders).