EPN Automotive Electronics Blog

Joystick for delivery

Delivery cars are everywhere and they are, at least in Germany, one of the major hazards for traffic safety and the environment. A think tank on future transport and mobility issues has just projected a new type of vehicle.

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.

Playing the fuel card

Business-to-business fuel cards offer companies that operate fleets of commercial vehicles a convenient way to pay and account for fuel and other services. However, there are at least three parties involved: The petrol company, an infrastructure provider and someone dealing with potential customers.

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…

The muffled truck

Particularly in metropolitan and urban areas, the noise produced by delivery trucks, buses, coaches and urban municipal vehicles constitutes a form of environmental pollution. A special ant-sound-technology might prove helpful.

“Energy-Efficient Driving 2014”

The complete supply chain around the automotive industry has joined the new research project called Energy-Efficient Driving 2014 (EFA 2014), bringing its expertise in direct co-operation. In fact, not many important brands are missing there: Audi, Audi Electronic Venture, BMW Group, Bosch, Continental Automotive, Elmos Semiconductor, Flextronics Automotive, FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik, Harman Automotive Division, Infineon Technologies and metaio . They are all focussing on the one and only target: cutting consumption by up to 10 % till 2014.

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.

Joint diagnostics

Independent garages or car repair shops have been complaining about the multitude of electronic devices in modern vehicles since the first microcontroller entered a crucial car system. It took a bit longer for FPGAs, communication buses and similar technology to gain a foothold in commercial vehicles, but now electronics is there as well. Whoever thought car diagnostics has become difficult has never looked inside a modern truck repair station.