The Euro New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) recently updated their standards for radar to improve driver assistance features in new cars.
NCAP standards vary by region; in the U.S., our NCAP is governed by the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration a.k.a. NHTSA and the Global NCAP is a centralized organization. However, all organizations have the same goal: to set standards…
As automotive original equipment manufacturers develop vehicles with increasing autonomy, automating the act of parking continues to evolve. These parking systems include park assistance (where a driver’s participation is still necessary) and automated parking (where hands-free operation is possible).
Today’s automotive parking systems use ultrasonic and camera sensors.…
Ground projection around vehicles has made great strides in recent years with the addition of logo projectors. Auto makers have used logo projection to enable vehicle owners to customize their car while still providing some functionality by lighting the ground around the doors. However, these systems are currently only able to display a single pattern and do not support any features…
On our way to zero-emission transportation, hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) present a natural transition from internal combustion engines (ICE) to battery electric vehicle (BEV). This transition period will take years, and brings in several types of hybrid vehicles depending on the level of electrification. On one end, we have mild hybrid vehicles with typically…
With a swipe of the hand, gesture detection gives drivers a new way to control in-cabin climates, lighting, windows, infotainment systems and more. There are currently several options for adjusting various comfort and convenience functions in the cabin. However, manipulating the buttons, knobs and especially touchscreens requires drivers to divert their eyes.
Today, many automotive…
Automotive emissions standards are becoming more stringent every year, making it challenging for internal combustion engine (ICE) car manufacturers to keep up. One of their efforts to reduce emissions involves electrifying the drivetrain, either partially or fully, to improve the effective efficiency of the engine, partially disable the engine or eliminate the engine completely (see Figure 1).
Of course, this electrification…
When you can create automotive applications that do more with fewer parts, you’ll reduce both weight and cost and improve reliability. That’s the idea behind integrating electric vehicle (EV) and hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) designs.
What is powertrain integration?
Powertrain integration combines end equipment such as the onboard charger (OBC), high-voltage DC/DC (HV DCDC), inverter and power distribution…
*Please note this article originally published in EDN.
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar is one of the primary sensing modalities for automotive and industrial applications because of its ability to detect objects from few centimeters to several hundred meters with high distance, angle and velocity accuracy, even in challenging environmental conditions.
A typical radar sensor consists…
Jürgen Belz, senior consultant, functional safety and cybersecurity at Prometo, co-authored this technical article.
The migration from internal combustion engines (ICEs) to electric vehicles (EVs) requires at least five new electrical/electronic/programmable electronic (E/E/PE) systems. Figure 1 depicts these systems within an EV.
Figure 1: Block diagram of a typical EV powertrain
In order to zero out tailpipe emissions…
Bluetooth® Low Energy is on a path to become ubiquitous. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group estimates that by 2024, all new phones, tablets and laptops will support Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy. They also expect 35% of devices to ship with single-mode Bluetooth Low Energy by 2024, which represents 300% growth in annual shipments.
The reason for this is the versatility of Bluetooth Low Energy. Bluetooth…
Jürgen Belz, senior consultant, functional safety and cybersecurity at PROMETO co-authored this technical article.
With functional safety and security concerns in automotive electronics gaining attention, including in standards bodies, it’s important for automotive designers to enable functionally safe and secure automotive electric powertrains. Functional safety, cybersecurity and high-voltage safety play an important…
A wireless BMS allows vehicle designers can remove heavy, expensive, maintenance-prone cabling and improve the reliability and efficiency of hybrid and electric or hybrid vehicles (HEV/EV). TI’s solution for wireless BMS empowers you to reduce the complexity of your designs, improve reliability and reduce vehicle weight to extend driving range.
To speed automakers’ development time for wireless BMS, we requested…
Think of a passenger car as a collection of electronic control units (ECUs) that are distributed across the length and breadth of the car and talk to each other using different networks. When adding more advanced automotive electronics for vehicle-to-everything (V2X), automated driving and vehicle electrification, the number of ECUs increases and the amount of data exchanged grows.
Moreover, the increased number of ECUs…
Recently, there has been a big push in the automotive lighting industry to improve both vehicle headlight functionality and driver visibility, which has led to the development of adaptive driving beam (ADB) headlights. ADB is an automotive exterior lighting system that automatically controls the high beam, to allow the driver to focus on the road ahead without manually controlling…
Most of today’s automotive vehicles use some level of autonomy. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) defines five levels of autonomy, from level 0 to level 5 (Figure 1). In this technical article, I’ll discuss the DC/DC power-supply needs…
Automotive suppliers and original equipment manufacturers are heavily investing software R&D efforts on adding new functions and features to achieve autonomy, electrification and connectivity. Still, enabling these functions by adding more electronic control units (ECUs) is not sustainable when it results in increased complexity and cost.
There are two ways to consolidate and…
The core function of the body control module (BCM) is to monitor inputs such as the state of the high-beam switch and enable or disable power to the corresponding loads such as the high-beam lamp. The BCM also includes circuits that monitor different functions for faults. When a fault is detected, the driver could be notified, in some cases additional circuits in the BCM drive…
Co-authored by Kevin Stauder, systems engineer, automotive body electronics and lighting
For decades, the internal combustion engine (ICE) has run the car as well as the heating and cooling systems. As the automotive industry electrifies and transitions to hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) with small combustion engines or fully electric vehicles (EVs) with no engine at all, how will the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning…
Technology availability, market and environmental regulations, and infrastructure buildout are aligning to turn a long-forecasted future of full-electric vehicles (EVs) into reality. According to the International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook 2020, sales of EVs, including plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), reached a global peak of 2.1 million in 2019, increasing the total number of such vehicles on the…
This article was originally published on eeworldonline.com.
A local dimming backlight technology individually adjusts LEDs in an LCD panel to save power and improve contrast ratios in automotive displays. Compared to globally dimmed displays and organic LEDs (OLEDs), local dimming with LEDs is a more practical design choice because it can withstand the extreme temperatures and vibration common in automotive applications…
The U.K., Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark and France have already proposed plans to outlaw internal combustion engines (ICE), with China also studying when to ban ICE vehicles. So the writing is on the wall that powerful electric motors, also known as traction motors, will play a significant and increasing role as the engine propelling the vehicle. But electric motors are already dominant in many other automotive applications…
This article was originally published on eeworldonline.com.
Automotive specifications and environmental conditions have caused the automotive display market to lag behind the consumer display industry in contrast ratio, black levels, resolution, curvature and form factor. Automakers are trying to differentiate their infotainment human-machine interface (HMI) displays and catch up to the technological advances now common…
Somewhere in the world today, an automotive engineer is envisioning an infotainment system for a car that won’t be realized for another five years or more. This includes factoring in the power requirements for applications that exist only as concepts today. As infotainment systems evolve in sophistication and electronic functionality, the number of integrated circuits (ICs…
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