EPN Automotive Electronics Blog

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.

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.

Look back in OLED

It’s been twelve months since the ORECA 01 racing car from Oreca racing made its first appearance at the Sarthe and now it’s ready to take on the 24 Hours of Le Mans 2010. A special mirror, probably bordering on disqualification, is supposed to lend it the necessary edge.

The future at your fingertips

Just imagine you wouldn’t need to press button anymore? Just with a soft fingertip you’ll start the car, point where you want to go or start the infotainment system by intuitively using your fingertips to quickly and easily adjust temperature, change audio volume, or find a location on the map. This all could be possible, promises Cypress Semiconductor  as the company has introduced the “world's broadest Automotive-Qualified Touch-Sensing Portfolio featuring industry's first capacitive touchscreen solution”, acclaims Hassane El-Khoury, Automotive Business Unit Manager at Cypress.

Video on the road

APIX short for Automotive Pixel Link, connects Cameras to Displays. This Gigabit connection from Inova Semiconductors is an advancement of Inova’s remote display connection Gigastar for automotive applications. Together with Xilinx , the company has developed an APIX IP core for the Spartan-6 XA FPGAs.

Virtual Instrument Cluster

A glimpse of the future is what Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe intends to show at embedded world 2010 with a new application concept: It is supposed to demonstrate the possibilities of virtual instrumentation in future passenger and commercial vehicles. On this way, the company aims to provide a ‘right-sized’ complete system solution including hardware and software components, a demo application, as well as tool support to enable a quick start to development.

embedded world 2010: That’s how the future will look like

Despite the crisis, the the industry’s international get-together continues its growth: The trade show embedded world 2010 is setting trends and records. Especially within the automotive area there is a lot of movement going on: The amount of electronics, software and control devices installed in motor vehicles is growing dramatically, and the move towards electric cars will only strengthen this trend.