EPN Automotive Electronics Blog

At the charging post

Slightly oversized companies like Siemens do have an advantage: ideally, one business area can profit from the development work of others. At times, one of the business areas is missing (think VDO), but a topic that’s out of sight doesn’t have to be out of mind. That’s when the industry automation division constructs a charging point for electrical vehicles.

Sensors against collisions

A big deal for Jenoptik, manufacturer of optical components: The East-Germany-based company just signed a long-term delivery contract with automotive supplier Magna and expands its production of sensors for the automotive industry.

Japan: News from Distributors

European and international distributors offer online information about the delivery and supply situation regarding their Japanese linecards.

Convertibles from Osnabrück

In the course of one year, Volkswagen has not just finished a new production facility but also brought its new convertible series to manufacturing readiness. The plant might help this economically unstable region of northern Germany to gain a foothold again.

Desperate days

After the horrifying earthquake followed by the disastrous tsunami, Japan now faces its most serious crisis since World War II. The country is confronted with a cascade of accumulating problems that suggest that radioactive releases of steam from the crippled nuclear power plants could go on for weeks or even months. At least, Tokyo’s stock exchange Nikkei plunged over 6% with start on Monday and ended below 10,000 after the quake: Major carmakers fell across the board on Monday as they were forced to suspend operations at their plants, largely due to shortages of supplies, while construction-linked shares surged on investors' expectations of an increase in demand for rebuilding.

Green seat

Car interior surface materials had generally used petroleum-based materials such as PET fibers, due to their durability and flame retardant nature. A new material, developed by Mitsubishi Motors (MMC), combines PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) and cotton fibres as a new addition to its »Green Plastic« line-up, a plant-based material technology.

Where to go? What to see first?

What a week! Last week, technics aficionados had the choice between three tremendous trade shows – each one of CeBIT (1 to 5 March), embedded world (1 to 3 March) and 81. International Motorshow Geneva (3 to 13 March) is said to have “performed extremely well” and of course to have been “highly successful”. All of the events had their own key trends, hot topics and even a few highlights.

All in one

EMBEDDED WORLD 2011 – Virtual dashboards, car navigation and camera-based driver assistance from a single chip - impossible? Maybe, but Fujitsu says it can, with the SoC MB86R12 ‘Emerald-P’ with integrated APIX2 interface. It seems that the Doubtless, in cars of the future the is the virtual display will be the primary interface with the driver, replacing traditional instruments such as pointers, knobs and buttons and maybe even the view of the road ahead. It could bring entirely new applications into the car, not only increasing comfort but also safety, as is the case with camera-based driver assistance systems such as night vision assistance and head up display applications, the engineers of Fujitsu are convinced.

Slamming the brakes on theft

EMBEDDED WORLD 2011 – The security of automotive electronics systems is an escalating topic of concern for automotive OEMs, owners and the insurance industry. Hard times for thiefs in the future: Not only the electronic control of automotive systems is steadily increasing, with large amounts of data streaming through body control modules (BCM)/gateways which are difficult to crack. Freescale Semiconductor aims to help reducing the security risks for that data with new additions to its MPC56xx family of Qorivva 32-bit microcontrollers built on the Power Architecture.