EPN Automotive Electronics Blog

Threewise triple MCU

In modern automotive systems, various bus systems, rigid safety demands and the need for high performance at low power have to be balanced. While there are many specialized automotive chips like microcontrollers and SoCs around, this  is an area where the general trend towards higher integration finally makes sense.

IC for door and window

While most driver assistance functions in modern cars are connected to and controlled by electronic systems, windows of all things are using reliable Old-fashiond electromagnetic pulses.

Outback racers

Australia - deadly animals, marsupials, convicts, desert and sun. The perfect place for a solar car race, and this year an American student car with European electronics took part rather successfully.

Safer ECUs

The ISO 26262 functional safety standard for road vehicles poses various problems for component manufacturers as well as for system integrators. Luckily, not all control units in a car are that safety critical, but the ones that need to comply require extensive checking and testing during all stages of product development.

European Eco-SoC

In times of growing euro-scepticism the engineering community demonstrates the benefits of cooperation in the union. The recently completed EU FP7 project »ATHENIS« (Automotive Tested High Voltage Embedded Non Volatile Memory Integrated System On Chip) is a successful example of collaborative European Research contributing to the EU 2020 CO₂ reduction objectives with IC products manufactured in Europe.

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.

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.

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.