Patent ID: 8001290

Claim:
A vehicle computer system comprising: a central computer coupled to a vehicle component; speakers coupled to the central computer; an AM/FM tuner module; one or more peripheral audio sources; an audio manager application program interface (API) to transfer calls from an application running on the central computer to device drivers for the AM/FM tuner module and/or the one or more peripheral audio sources; a data memory including one or more ping/pong buffers; an audio signal processor; and a logic unit configured to receive audio data from the AM/FM tuner module and one or more peripheral audio sources, the logic unit including a plurality of audio source direct memory access (DMA) circuits each associated with a particular storage area of an I/O memory, wherein one of the audio source DMA circuits is associated with the AM/FM tuner module and other of the audio source DMA circuits are each respectively associated with a specific one of the one or more peripheral audio sources, and further wherein the logic unit includes at least one data processor DMA circuit associated with the audio signal processor, wherein each audio source DMA circuit is configured to write audio data to a ping buffer within the respective particular storage area of the I/O memory, while the at least one data processor DMA circuit reads audio data from a pong buffer within a data memory.