EPN Automotive Electronics Blog

Japan: News from Distributors

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

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.

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.

embedded world 2011: Infotainment-SoC

For me it is not terribly clear why one needs high-definition video in a car’s dashboard, since one is not supposed to watch the newest Coen brothers movie there and even a Sat Nav doesn’t need 1080p, much less the »virtual« tachometers. However, nowadays it’s even being installed in mid-range cars, so there seems to be some kind of demand. A good thing for semiconductor manufacturers.

Sensitive for crash situations

More safety – less dead victims: Freescale Semiconductor expands its Xtrinsic sensing portfolio with “intelligent” radar technology. Using Silicon Germanium (SiGe) instead of Gallium Arsenid (GaAs), the 77 GHz chipset enables vehicles to sense potential crash situations, claims the company.

Hitch your car to a star

The Korean foundry Dongbu HiTek is reaching for the stars: Specialized on analog and mixed signal semiconductor technologies, it’s trying to expand its business into automotive ICs. Its process technologies have undergone high-quality automotive certifications and now they’re ready for more.