In this EE Times Europe article, Neil Trevett describes how the need for graphics and compute acceleration in embedded markets is growing. Cameras and sensor arrays are increasingly central to many use cases in diverse industries, ranging from automotive to industrial, and are generating increasingly rich data streams that require sophisticated processing. At the same time, advanced user interfaces are being developed using high-quality 3D graphics and even augmented-reality technology. However, the need to deploy accelerated processing, combined with the complexities of safety-critical certification, has created a confusing landscape of processors, accelerators, compilers, APIs, and libraries. That has driven up integration costs for embedded accelerators, which in turn has constrained innovation and time-to-market efficiencies.

Open standards have an important role in helping hardware and software vendors navigate this complex technology environment. Acceleration standards for the embedded market can enable cross-platform software reusability, decouple software and hardware development for easier deployment and integration of new components, provide cross-generation reusability, and facilitate field upgradability. Such standards reduce costs, shorten time to market, and lower the barriers to using advanced techniques such as inferencing and vision acceleration in compelling real-world products.

Imagination Technologies new OpenGL SC 2.0 safety critical driver development for its automotive GPUs enables automotive OEMs and Tier 1s to benefit from GPU acceleration in safety-critical applications. The OpenGL SC driver demo shows an advanced dashboard with safety-critical elements running on existing automotive silicon. More information can be found in the accompanying blog post. The OpenGL SC 2.0 driver is based on a published Khronos specification and is expected to pass the Khronos Conformance Process when available. Current conformance status can be found at www.khronos.org/conformance.

Khronos has formed a liaison agreement with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in the interest of jointly advancing open geospatial standards related to AR and VR, distributed simulation, and 3D content services. The liaison will let Khronos and OGC assess standards in these fields as well as identify future potential standards that will facilitate interoperability and hardware capabilities of relevant data sharing and analysis. The collaboration will occur through working groups, forums, workshops, committee activities, etc., and OGC will adopt Khronos standards where appropriate.

Illya Rudkin from Khronos Member Codeplay will be speaking at the 5th Scandinavian Conference on System and Software Safety on Standardizing Technologies for Safety Critical Systems. Learn more about this talk on the Khronos events page.

The Khronos Group today announced the formation of a Safety Critical Advisory Panel to create guidelines for the design of safety critical graphics, compute and vision processing APIs. The Safety Critical Advisory Panel will be open to both Khronos members and invited experts from the industry. Markets such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), autonomous vehicles, robotics and avionics increasingly need advanced acceleration APIs that are designed to provide reliable operation and enable system safety certification. The guidelines will be openly published and adopted as part of Khronos’ proven API design process. Experienced practitioners in the field of safety critical system design are invited to apply for Advisory Panel membership, at no cost, with more details at the Khronos Safety Critical working group page.

The Khronos Group announces the immediate availability of the OpenGL SC 2.0 specification for bringing programmable graphics to systems that require system safety certification. The OpenGL SC 2.0 API specification has been developed by the Khronos Safety Critical working group to address the unique and stringent requirements of high reliability display system markets, including FAA DO-178C and EASA ED-12C Level A for avionics, and ISO 26262 safety standards for automotive. Building on the large number of worldwide customer deployments and successful avionics certifications using OpenGL SC 1.0, OpenGL SC 2.0 enables high reliability system manufacturers to take advantage of modern graphics programmable shader engines while still achieving the highest levels of safety certification. The Official OpenGL SC 2.0 feedback forum is online.

Khronos Safety Critical Working Group Chair Erik Noreke recently spoke at the 4th annual Scandinavian Conference on System and Software Safety (SCSSS). The slides from the presentation are now online.

The CNN Ecosphere Project was conceived by Heimat-Berlin and developed and produced by Minivegas (Amsterdam, Los Angeles) in partnership with Stinkdigital (London, New York). Utilizing WebGL to visualize represent growing discussions on twitter.

The new version of music creation software FL-Studio contains a brand new OpenGL powered music visualizer called “ZGameEditor Visualizer” based on the free open source ZGameEditor engine. It comes with over 40 built-in effects that can respond to the music in various ways and it also allows you to create your own effects and share with others. Other features include using video to texture 3d-objects and publish your videos to YouTube.

The Khronos Group just wrapped up another DevU, this time in Seoul. Presentations slides from all the sessions are now online. Some of the Khronos APIs covered at this DevU were OpenGL ES, OpenCL, OpenGL, OpenGL SC, OpenVG and OpenMAX and OpenSL ES by AMD, ARM, DMP, DrawElements, HUONE, NVIDIA, Rightware and Samsung and Takumi. A complete schedule of events is available in our event archives.

ALT Software, an embedded graphics leader won the contract to develop OpenGL ES and Open VG device drivers for POWERVR SGX graphics IP core in next-generation System on Chip processor designed for high performance in power constrained devices. ALT Software has been developing OpenGL and Safety-Critical 2D and 3D solutions since 1994.

ALT Software, the leading provider of advanced graphics software for safety-critical embedded systems, today announced its commitment to deliver DO-178B certifiable OpenGL drivers for the ATI Radeon™ E4690, AMD’s newest high performance embedded graphics accelerator. As part of its commitment to AMD’s Embedded GPU roadmap, ALT Software will be delivering both OpenGL SC (Safety Critical) and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for the ATI Radeon E4690.