TTP is a communications protocol originally developed at the Technical University of Vienna in Austria for automotive electronic applications such as brake-by-wire and steer-by-wire. The protocol is now owned and promoted by TTTech Computertechnik AG (Vienna). Once seen as an inevitable industry standard, several leading auto makers have bristled at TTTech's licensing terms and are now studying alternatives to the TTP protocol.

Oki, which holds a license to the ARM7TDMI and ARM9 processor cores of ARM Ltd. (Cambridge, England), plans to work with TTTech to integrate TTP hardware and software support into Oki's ARM-based automotive CPU development system.

"Automotive companies have challenging safety, performance and time-to-market requirements; an integrated ARM-TTP architecture will increase their ability to balance these demands," said Uwe Stock, manager of new product development at Oki Electric Europe GmbH.

Georg Kopetz, a TTTech cofounder responsible for the company's semiconductor partnerships, said, "By choosing to work with Oki Electric, we are partnering with a very dynamic electronics company on TTP solutions, this time with the powerful ARM core."