New technologies, heightened customer demand, and increasing competition are paving the way for changes in the automotive industry.
While its primary function, as a transport hardware provider, is unaltered, automotive manufacturers are adopting digital capabilities to gain a competitive edge in the market.
Today, multimedia applications are no longer limited to high-end cars, and connected mobility and transportation are fast becoming the new norm. More and more companies are thus adopting innovative technologies to enable better connectivity and enhance in-vehicle user-experience for end users.
Cidana: Enabling the Next-Generation Automotive Infotainment
There are about 100 million lines of software code running in an average modern car today. Vehicles are becoming intelligent thanks to technologies such as the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), telematics, advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), etc. There is also a plethora of hardware encompassed in cars that work along with this software to make end-users' experience better.
In-vehicle infotainment systems integrate several technologies, from various vendors, to give users a great driving experience. However, building such infotainment systems is not easy. This is where Cidana comes in.
Cidana, a software solution provider, is a pioneer in advanced multimedia solutions for the mobile, embedded, consumer electronics, and automotive market.
The company has over a decade of experience in making solutions for a broad range of products, including digital TV players, multimedia SDKs, and optimized audio-video codec components.
"Cidana's multimedia software solutions and services have been deployed in millions of devices over the past 13 years. Our vision is to help customers reduce R&D cost and accelerate time to market and product delivery," says Chinn Chin, Chief Executive Officer, Cidana Corporation.
Cidana: What We Offer
Cidana equips clients with customized codecs, multimedia playback, digital radio/TV, media metadata processing, media database management, and connectivity solutions for in-vehicle infotainment and CE devices.
“Cidana offers worldwide standards and platform independence. Our solutions optimize internal development cost, thus helping silicon vendors reduce in-house software support costs. We have built a wide spectrum of solutions in multimedia and have a proven track record for supporting tier-one OEMs” adds Chinn.
These solutions include:
- Software Codecs: Cidana offers highly efficient mux, demux, decoders, and encoders for all widely used audio, voice, video, and image standards. Cidana also offers multiple OS support for Android, iOS, Linux QNX, OS21, RTOS, WinCE, and Windows.
- Audio Center: Cidana offers complete solutions for audio processing algorithms that include resamplers, FIR/IIR filters, equalizers, poly chime, scaler, mixer, limiters,etc.
- Multimedia Playback: Cidana provides high-quality robust playback SDKs for popular media files, such as file extractors, audio decoders, and SW video decoders. Cidana has bundled these with SOC manufacturers, including Qualcomm and ST, and shipped millions of units.
- Streaming Media: Cidana provides smooth playback under varying network conditions.
- Digital TV: Cidana offers support for worldwide DTV standards, including DVB-T/T2, ISDB-T 1-Seg, ISDB-T Full Seg, SBTVD, ATSC. Cidana utilizes hardware-accelerated video decoders to support HD content, enables smart decoding technology that reduces CPU load, has good error resilience for weak signal reception, and supports multiple formats in one player.
- Digital Radio: Cidana offers support for common Digital Radio standards.
- Sync Player for rear-seat entertainment (RSE): Support synchronous A/V playback among WiFi-connected devices in the car.
- EAVB: Cidana’s Ethernet Audio Video Bridging (EAVB) is a suite of IEEE 802.1 standards for low latency delivery of real-time traffic and enables in-vehicle streaming for infotainment. EAVB provides API to integrate with the automotive applications for media distribution, receiving, playback, and control. System integrators can build RSE applications that support sophisticated user operation scenarios. EAVB enables the delivery of synchronized playback of audio and video among multiple devices with low latency.
- SmartDeviceLink (SDL): Cidana provides an SDL solution for both mobile applications and in-vehicle interface. Smart devices and vehicles are connected via standard protocols like Bluetooth, WIFI, and USB. An application from the smart device will make requests to the vehicle and the vehicle responds. It supports multiple platforms (Android and iOS) from various sources, like media files, streaming, etc.
- FIDO: Cidana can help deploy Fast Identity Online (FIDO) technology to the automotive market.
Easy Connect: Cidana Easy Connect maintains a seamless multimedia experience among different 4C devices.