HMI experience to power automotive instrument clusters

OEMs are increasingly focusing on delivering an immersive human-machine interface experience to their customers, which has led to the rise of the digital cockpit.

Considering that digital instrument clusters are a key element of the digital cockpit, the screens, displays and user interfaces that comprise these instrument clusters play a crucial role in the overall driver experience.

However, the displays in digital instrument clusters must address several stringent design and technical requirements to enable the driver to safely use them, which creates significant development challenges for OEMs. Not only must OEMs provide responsive graphics and reliable performance for their displays, but they must also meet functional safety standards with very rapid design-to-development production cycles.

China is the largest automotive marketplace in the world, and Neusoft sought to partner with a software provider to pursue the huge market opportunity in the region. After careful evaluation, Neusoft selected Qt’s cross-platform software development framework to serve as one of the foundations for the digital instrument clusters for Neusoft’s OEM customers. Neusoft determined that Qt was the framework of choice due to its ability to meet the industry’s rapidly changing requirements, as well as the fact that Qt is fully customisable and offers its source code to all of its users.

“The contradiction between a better human-machine interface (HMI) experience and shorter time-to-market and lower costs is a significant challenge, especially considering OEMs are paying more attention to the digital experience than ever before,” said Lingjun Meng, Vice President for Neusoft, and GM of Neusoft’s Automotive Business Unit.

“We have been paying close attention to Qt’s technology and found that Qt has made significant progress in the automotive industry in recent years, especially in the arena of functional safety. We are excited to cooperate with Qt and look forward to delivering superior products to our customers.”

“We are delighted to see Neusoft selecting Qt as the primary digital instrument cluster technology for China’s automotive market,” said Juhapekka Niemi, Executive Vice President for The Qt Company. “Qt is becoming the leading instrument cluster technology with highly advanced 2D and 3D features and integrated design tooling. Qt is suitable for low-end hardware solutions, as well as the very complex high end hardware that supports the advanced features required in tomorrow’s digital cockpits.”

Due to the availability of its source code, Qt’s technology provides Neusoft with much more control over the entire development process than ever before. In addition, Qt is extremely flexible, as it enables users to write code once and run it on any platform.

Furthermore, by partnering with Qt, Neusoft gains access to Qt’s massive global community of development experts and practitioners, as well as Qt’s professional support services.

In addition to providing a comprehensive, cross-platform development framework, Qt’s technology is fast, efficient, and highly user-friendly. Qt’s framework also features Qt Safe Renderer, which provides Neusoft with a solution for rendering the safety-critical information in functional safety applications based on Qt.