EPN Automotive Electronics Blog

Ethernet drive

Happy new year, dear readers - welcome to the future! One vision of the future is the ‘connected car’, and many drivers seem to want that. As consumer demand for in-vehicle connectivity continues to grow, automotive manufacturers are under pressure to deliver competitive, innovative features while minimizing cost. A major stumbling block is cabling - it’s heavy, difficult to design and expensive.

The three-bus board

Among the most critical points in automotive electronics are intersections of different bus systems. Those areas need to be designed and tested thoroughly – and it’s a bonus when the development device can be used in all stages, even in production.

Testing ECUs

Modern cars consist of dozens of electronic control units. This modular architecture facilitates development and manufacturing as well as after-sales service. Even testing isn’t too hard, except when it comes to interactions between the modules. At that point, functional testing needs to go hand in hand with communications analysis.

Signal conditioning

Among the most used electronic components in modern cars are sensors. Since they are omnipresent, they came into focus for space saving. Most (analogue) sensing components can’t shrink much but the ‘back end’ like signal conditioning can.

Approved CAN bus coupler

In order to ensure reliable operation of motor vehicles on the road, German law requires a motor vehicle type approval (Allgemeine Betriebs-Erlaubnis, ABE) – also referred to as »e1« approval – for all components that are connected to the vehicle's electrical system. This is required even for the most unspectacular components.

MOST goes Coax

The new specification for MOST150 allows on the one hand for communication and power supply on the same cable, on the other for optical coaxial cables. This is not a contradiction.

MOST150 on a roll

While MOST certainly is the largest, most implemented multimedia network for automotive applications, it seems to have got a bit quiet around it lately. Alas, springtime is MOST Forum time, where news get spread around.

Model truck

Inefficient driving techniques can increase carbon emissions and raise fuel consumption by as much as 10%. For a company with 20 trucks, each driven 120,000 kilometres a year, this translates to 200 tons

European IESF 2010 Conference: be there or be square

According to Mentor Graphics, its upcoming European IESF 2010 Conference which will be held on December 2nd, 2010 in Frankfurt, is one of the the world’s leading events for design engineers, engineering management and executives in the Automotive and Commercial Vehicles industry. As it is a free event, seats are limited…

Extensible prototyping

While automotive electronics makes driving much more comfortable, »electronified« modern cars also have shorter lifetime and design time than »oldtimers«. So, the new car with the heatable cigarette lighter won’t last for 20+ years like but we won’t have to wait 10 years for the successor. Development tools need to develop even faster…