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Visteon Brings Range of New Driver Information Solutions to CES

LAS VEGAS -- The global automotive supplier Visteon Corporation (NYSE: VC) Tuesday unveiled the latest additions to its suite of driver information products.

At the 2012 International CES in Las Vegas, the world's largest consumer technology trade show, Visteon is demonstrating a wide range of driver information innovations, from entry-level solutions to fully reconfigurable instrument clusters.

Visteon's new premium and mid-range driver information platforms are designed to meet the ever-increasing demands for higher-resolution color displays in vehicles. Both platforms deliver an array of information drivers need to navigate and control the vehicle environment.

The premium solution builds on the reconfigurable cluster platform launched by Visteon on Jaguar Land Rover's Range Rover in mid-2009, which redefined the functional role of instrumentation in vehicles. That cluster, featuring a 12.3-inch full-color thin film transistor display, presented on-demand driver information via virtual gauges, graphical displays and a message center.

Visteon's premium platform provides the flexibility of reconfigurability, while maintaining premium brand craftsmanship through precise gauge movements and the introduction of 3-D photorealistic graphics. This scalable platform can support higher-resolution 1440 by 540 pixels on 12.3-inch TFT displays while delivering increased pixel color depth, and up to 800 by 480 pixels WVGA on the secondary display.

"While delivering high-performance consumer graphics, this high-end platform provides a highly flexible architecture and state-of-the-art tool chain, enabling vehicle manufacturers to reduce development times significantly," said Christian Feltgen, Visteon's global director, cockpit electronic technologies.

Addressing a rapidly expanding market segment, the mid-range platform features high-quality graphics, video and animation on up to two TFT displays, combined with traditional analog gauges. This platform provides a hardware solution that integrates the host/vehicle microprocessor and a graphics processor into a single chip, delivering cost and design efficiencies.

"Our research shows TFTs represent the fastest-growing market segment for automotive-based instrument clusters," Feltgen said. "Visteon's mid-range driver information platform addresses this trend by delivering the increasing level of sophistication that consumers and automakers now expect in an instrument cluster at a competitive price point. The feature scalability that can be applied to a wide range of vehicle segments makes this particularly attractive to vehicle manufacturers."

This scalable platform architecture employs software and reconfigurable human machine interaction that maximizes engineering re-use and simplifies the development process. Target feature sets range from passive dot matrix LCD displays to a larger, 8-inch WVGA with 24-bit color TFT. The larger array has an option to simultaneously drive two WQVGA TFTs.

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