TES Electronic Solutions announced an automotive telematics reference design supporting advanced location-based services. The “Titan” platform is offered either as a thin client running Linux or Windows CE, or as a low cost M2M platform, and incorporates GPS, GSM/GPRS, and configurable I/O, says the company.

(Click for larger view of the TES Titan reference design)

TES had few details about the Titan, but promised to reveal more in the coming weeks. The Titan design is said to be customizable and intended to be deployed in different versions that address a wide variety of telematics service provider requirements. Applications include vehicle and capital equipment tracking, as well as emerging applications such as pay-as-you-drive, pay-how-you-drive, and pay-when-you-drive, says TES.

The thin client version of the Titan is said to offer an ARM9 processor, as well as a Telit quad-band cellular modem that includes a SiRF StarIII GPS receiver. Judging from the photo above, TES appears to be referring to the Telit GE863-PRO system-on-chip (SoC), which combines a baseband processor and RF module with a 200MHz ARM9-based Atmel AT91SAM9260 application processor.

The Atmel processor on the Telit GE863-PRO is supported by 4MB of flash and 64MB of RAM. The module is available with a development board and Linux 2.6 implementation, and Telit provides numerous reference designs incorporating peripherals such as a camera, keyboard, display, WiFi, Bluetooth, SmartCard, SD Card, Ethernet, ZigBee, and GPS.

The TES Guiliani framework (Click for details)

Although not stated in the press release, the Titan is likely available with TES' new graphical user interface (GUI) toolkit for embedded Linux developers, the Guiliani HMI (human machine interface) framework for Linux. The Guiliani framework (pictured) supports OpenGL ES on both hardware- and software-accelerated GPUs (graphical processing units), and includes a Linux software development kit (SDK).

Stated Nick Walker, SVP of Business Development at TES, “TES Electronic Solutions have all the skills and expertise to create, design, manufacture and distribute optimised telematics devices for every application. Our approach to the business is geared to allow the telematics service providers to focus on building out the applications based on the device while we take care of the device delivery.”

Availability

The Titan reference design is available now, says TES, but no pricing information was offered. More information on TES telematics products (the Titan currently not included) may be found here.

 
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