Second MOST Forum Focused on Consumer Device Connectivity to MOST

The second MOST Forum took place on March 23rd, 2010, in Frankfurt, Germany. 150 professionals from the automotive electronics industry and academia participated in the very informative conference and visited the accompanying exhibition. The broad international audience was composed of attendees from Europe as well as India, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Besides the OEM's perspective and discussion of the ongoing MOST150 development and production launch, the message of the MOST Forum concentrated on two aspects: flexible means of connectivity to the MOST network and the readiness of MOST150 for new applications beyond pure infotainment, said Dr. Christian Thiel, MOST Cooperation Administrator. The conference marks the kickoff for the MOST future in proving the technology's compliance to new connectivity interfaces and functionalities. Response was positive overall: the attendees very much appreciated the high quality of the conference. They were enthusiastic about the informative and interesting presentations and looked forward to future MOST events.

Universal Plug-n-Play to Connect Consumer World to MOST

For fast and flexible connectivity of consumer devices to the in-car MOST network, it was discussed how Universal Plug-n-Play (UPnP) can be leveraged in a MOST based infotainment system. UPnP describes a standard of the home entertainment and consumer electronics world, providing standard interfaces for many entertainment functions. Due to its capability to transport Ethernet frames and IP based services transparently, UPnP can seamlessly migrate into car infotainment applications as well. The embedded car world and the consumer world can be blended seamlessly. Furthermore, UPnP was proposed for a MOST/IP gateway, describing the signaling to establish audio streaming between a consumer device and the vehicle's infotainment system.

MOST150 Is Ready for Driver Assist Applications

The latest research results have been presented at the MOST Forum, proving that MOST150 is prepared to support safety-critical applications and is a viable candidate as the future network for driver assistance systems. Driver assistance functions are starting to complete and extend the feature set of traditional infotainment systems, and the number of vehicles with driver assistance features like camera systems, distance controls, or lane departure warnings will increase rapidly. The new requirements demand a network update, since a suitable network will have to be both high speed and high safety. None of today's existing vehicle networks entirely fulfills these requirements. However, from all available candidates, the MOST network is the one that already today comes very close to the new requirements.


In the well attended exhibition area, various companies presented their innovative MOST solutions and applications. Amongst the exhibitors was the MOST Cooperation with a demonstrator showing that MOST supports star, daisy-chain, tree and other topologies as well as different physical layers. The carmakers Audi and BMW demonstrated the latest car models that just had been introduced to the market. Further exhibits were by Avago Technologies, Dension Audio Systems, GADV, Göpel electronic, Hamamatsu Photonics, ICT Software Engineering, K2L, Melexis, Ontorix, Ruetz System Solutions, SMSC, TOYODA GOSEI, and Vector Informatik. Industry partners SAE International (Society of Automotive Engineering, www.sae.org) and ZVEI (Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association, www.zvei.org) as well as the media partners Auto Electronics (www.autoelectronics.com), Elektronik automotive (www.elektroniknet.de), and ElektronikPraxis (www.elektronikpraxis.de) supported the MOST Forum and displayed their latest publications and work.