Automotive Electronics Blog

Vehicles in a new light

The modern lighting solutions LED and Xenon are very good for end customers - drivers -, but the service industry and garages doesn't like them much, since their operational life is exceptionally long. They practically don't exist in the automotive aftermarket or replacement market. This is especially bad for the small but existing number of users who need spare parts.

Sensor manufacturer chairs DASH7 AWG

The newly formed automotive working group within the DASH7 Alliance is co-chaired by the Belgian semiconductor company Melexis. The company’s mission as co-chair will be to craft a multi-year roadmap for bringing DASH7 into a variety of automotive applications and markets.

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.

Integration carried to extremes

There are some things that can be combined in a meaningful, even beneficial way – let’s say, a PC mainboard and a hard disk drive -, some that don’t make as much sense – there certainly is no obvious reason to integrate a telephone with a camera – and the other ones. Opinions on that matter may differ, as it might be the case with the integrated remote keyless entry (RKE) and tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) that TRW has introduced a few days ago.

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.