Automotive Electronics Blog

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

Compact cars stay on track

In 2009, the number of newly registered vehicles in Europe equipped with the electronic stability control program ESP/ESC rose from 55% to 60%. An evaluation of the new figures by Bosch shows that this was above all due to considerable growth in the compact car segment.

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.

Steer and turn

Steering-angle sensors measure the steering wheel's actual position, the value which an increasing number of systems use to determine the direction the driver wants the vehicle to take. Bosch’s new sensor LWS6 measures relatively over an unlimited measuring range. Its typical signal resolution is 1.5°.

Functional safety all over

There is no doubt that safety is one of the main topics of the future automotive market. This might be the reason that in its latest version 6.1, the tool RiskCAT from Hitex Development Tools provides various enhancements and support for ISO 26262 (DIS).

Secure radio signal puts off car thieves

What if it’s not only your car that starts blinking when you try to open it with the remote but some other cars surrounding it do the same? This might actually look funny as long as nobody else drove away with your vehicle. Fact is that radio transmission for remote keyless entry systems is still not particularly secure. This was quite a good motivation for the reseach scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) in Garching (near Munich) to do some brainstorming about a secure radio signal for central locking. In due course they developed an encryption technique which increases security without draining the key’s battery.