EPN Automotive Electronics Blog

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…

Isolators for hybrid cars

The simple I2C bus connects controllers and peripheral devices. In automotive and especially hybrid electric vehicle applications, controllers or peripherals are isolated from the bus to avoid interference or harmful voltage levels. Usually, optocouplers are being used, but this increases the cost and complexity disproportionally. Digital isolators have the potential to simplify I2C design in electric and hybrid-electric vehicles.

TriCore on the road

We’ve all heard about the 60, 80 or 100 microcontrollers in todays or tomorrows cars, controlling ignition timing, displaying virtualized tachometers or illuminating the front-seat passenger’s ashtray. Since the assigned functions are so varied, those automobiles usually are a very diverse ecosystem for many different MCU families from a large number of different manufacturers.

CAN node à la carte

It may look like a mixture of an old-fashioned beeper and some gadget for taxi drivers and is none of those. The CAN bus remote controller »neoVI-MOTE«, developed by Intrepid Control Systems and distributed by Hitex Development Tools, is supposed to make working with the  CAN bus  easier.

Safety for Safety

Camera systems have become an important automotive safety component, typically combining multiple camera modules with advanced image analysis to help drivers monitor road conditions, detect hazards and avoid collisions. These cameras need to be controlled with as less as possible delay and the transmitted data has to be checked for safety and security reasons, so fast and reliable connections are mandatory.

More Power for more Horsepower

While automotive ECUs in general neither require nor use extremely powerful processors, the tools to develop them in a network infrastructure need to be as powerful as they come.

A tiny controller in a big car

More electronics, increasingly complex software: Modern cars are embedded systems on wheels. While communication between ECUs (Electronic control units) and other on-board systems has become more or less standardized with bus systems like CAN, LIN and sometimes already MOST and Flexray , there are still many proprietary communication solutions in the powertrain area.

MOST for the masses

It took quite a while for the “Multimedia-Bus” MOST to penetrate even the luxury car segment. Now it's becoming available in an entry level car, the Audi A1.

Measuring LIN

While LIN is the PHY- and protocol-wise the simplest of the currently used bus systems in cars, more often than not analysing systems know more about CAN , Flexray or even MOST than about the uncomplicated two-wire connection.

Two transceivers for two wires

Over the last years, LIN has gained significant global interest beyond its initial roots in the European automotive industry. The wide availability of tools which support design, development, simulation, analysis, calibration and testing of distributed networks have been the driving factors for the success of the cost-effective de-facto standard LIN. Even though the physical layer is very simple and due to the simplicity of the protocol there is not much need for processing units, no semiconductor manufacturer would want to miss the enormous volume. That’s why Microchip , specialized in unpretentious high-tech like 8-Bit-Microcontrollers, announced two stand-alone Transceivers for LIN 2.1 and SAE J2602 these days. The company’s promise: The low-power transceivers exceed German automotive manufacturer requirements.