Home » Resources » Success Story: FlashFX-SiemensVDO-Automotive

Success Story: FlashFX-SiemensVDO-Automotive

Datalight® FlashFX® Reduces Time to Market by 10-Months for Siemens VDO Automotive

The Challenge

Siemens VDO Automotive recently partnered with Daimler-Chrysler to create a wireless, GPS-based toll system for trucks in Germany. Their system provides an efficient, cost-effective way to track the location of moving trucks to automatically deduct appropriate tolls from shippers. One of the most critical elements of the system is the on-board flash memory that resides in each vehicle. The non-volatile flash memory must reliably store the truck’s planned route so it can be monitored by the wireless GPS for later billing.

The Datalight Solution

To consistently and effectively manage on-board flash memory, Siemens selected Datalight® FlashFX® software. FlashFX ensures the integrity of the stored data by supporting atomic writes into unused areas of a flash device.  If a power interruption occurs, the last saved data is still available—therefore toll-billing information is always preserved.

To maximize the life of the flash device, FlashFX uses each erase sector uniformly through a process called wear leveling. Wear leveling ensures that all erase sectors within a flash disk are used with the same frequency, minimizing repair and warranty costs.

The Customer Payoff

The FlashFX RTOS Porting Kit allowed Siemens to quickly port FlashFX to work with real-time operating system pSOS and to get FlashFX up and running on the ARM-based hardware platform.  Using FlashFX rather than creating their own flash memory management solution for pSOS saved Siemens 10-man months and an estimated $250,000 in project costs.

Today, the GPS-based toll system is a great success in Germany, and Siemens is pursuing opportunities to build similar systems for other countries.

NEWS