Smart chip for safer driving

US-based Xilinx, a leader in making programmable logic devices with an operations base in Hyderabad, has developed a smart chip Zynq that can be used for drivers’ assistance modules and information-entertainment applications in vehicles. The Zynq-7000 EPP (Extensible Processing Platform) is powered by the dual ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore 800 MHz processor. The stamp-sized chip will help the vehicle’s electronics to quickly gather, assimilate and process data while driving down power requirements. Some typical situations where the chip will be useful are giving alerts such as beep or a vibration in the steering wheel when a driver deviates from his lane or warning the driver when a pedestrian appears in the path of the vehicle.