Automotive instrument clusters are in the middle of a revolution. The cluster is rapidly becoming a part of the larger infotainment ecosystem. Consumers are driving around with intelligent, quickly evolving displays on their dash, but the audio chimes – the essential driver alerts that come from a speaker housed inside the cluster – are lagging behind.

Cluster audio…

It's incredibly important to indicate a system failure to users, especially when it comes to automotive lighting.

Consider the turn indicator in an automotive rear light, for example, which signals that a driver wants to change lanes or make a turn. A common and growing light source for turn indicators is LEDs, driven by a dual-stage LED driver circuit topology that includes a first-stage buck voltage regulator and…

There are three clear automotive trends: the migration to semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles, vehicles connected to the cloud with increasing data bandwidths, and vehicle electrification. These trends are driving changes to vehicle architectures. The current vehicle architecture is an ever-increasing number of engine control units (ECUs) connected by low-speed Controller…

Advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) features have been proven to reduce accidents and save lives. According to Consumer Reports, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows that there were 50% fewer front-to-rear crashes with vehicles equipped with forward-collision warning and automatic emergency braking technology compared to cars without these systems in 2017…

This article was co-authored by Trevor Dowd.

Whether the application is your smartphone, your TV or your car’s headlights, having more pixels is usually better. These additional pixels increase the readability of small text and make small details visible on TVs.

New automotive headlight applications like adaptive driving beam (ADB) became available when technology…

Electrification has created a new paradigm in automotive power systems; whether the design is a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) or fully electric vehicle (EV), there are new design challenges to address. In this technical article, I’d like to highlight some of the primary challenges in high-voltage current sensing and share additional resources to aid and simplify your design process. 

For an introduction to current…

Designing a better powertrain is the most significant way to reduce automotive emissions. Whether it’s improving the efficiency of a combustion engine or designing electric vehicles (EVs) or hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), electrification is powering a massive evolution of the powertrain as we know it.

This white paper, Basic considerations for sensors in the powertrain, examines the future of powertrain sensors…

During my first visit to the U.S., my brother and I drove from New York City to Columbus, Ohio. Although the 650-KM (400-mile) journey was long, our car’s automatic transmission and cruise control made the trip more comfortable. The effectiveness of an automatic transmission and cruise control relies on the precise control of proportional solenoids and motors, which…

In the cost-driven automotive industry, reducing bill-of-materials (BOM) costs by sharing resources across multiple subsystems (when possible) can give manufacturers an edge. Traditional automotive end-equipments often use independent hardware to control specific functions of the car, and chances to combine functions may be overlooked.

Adaptive headlight systems | Animated rear lights | Personalized interior lighting | Brighter, customized puddle lights | Transparent window displays

Automotive lighting continues to evolve at breakneck speeds. While LED light sources…

Everywhere you turn, you hear about “cars of the future.” As the automotive industry continues to make leaps to higher levels of autonomy, how will the driving experience evolve when people less actively drive the car?

That is no longer a hypothetical question. As our attention will no longer be directed at operating the vehicle, in-vehicle entertainment will become…

Connected driving, even though it exists today, still has a long way to go. In the future, vehicles will communicate with the driver, other cars, the road and surrounding infrastructure, pedestrians, and the cloud, all while giving passengers a constant connection.

Thanks to these increasing levels of connectivity, vehicles will be able to receive, interpret and transmit data – both within the vehicle as well as with…

In the future, your vehicle’s windows may display all kinds of information. New automotive technologies promise to turn standard automotive windows into single-color or even full-color dynamic displays. The two primary applications behind this trend are vehicle-to-pedestrian communication and advertising, illustrated respectively in Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 1: Ride-hailing…

In my previous article, I introduced the use of TI’s 77-GHz millimeter wave (mmWave) sensors for interior sensing applications like child presence detection, passenger detection and intruder detection.

The need for child presence detection has found its place on the EURO NCAP roadmap, driving car manufacturers to offer this feature. Adding child presence…

Car access has become more convenient as design engineers take advantage of technologies that are widely used in other applications. The automotive industry has evolved from providing mechanical keys to unlock vehicles to fobs with buttons that can unlock vehicles. Now, the most common form of car access revolves around passive entry passive start (PEPS) systems, enabling drivers to enter their car but also start the…

RAdio Detection And Ranging (RADAR) systems have been used in many applications for several decades, including everything from weather prediction to law enforcement, with automotive showing up around the turn of the 21^st century. This article examines a typical automotive use case and corresponding trends.

There are millions of 24 GHz-based radar systems on the road today and more…

The automotive industry is experiencing a tremendous transformation driven by consumers’ desire to leverage their phone as a key. By using phone-as-a-key, you can now eliminate the need for a traditional key fob in your passive entry passive start (PEPS) system. Bluetooth® Low Energy is a leading technology for this application because it is a versatile technology that is widely adopted in smartphones.

Figure…

There is still some confusion in the industry about the different roles that three major sensor types – camera, radar and LIDAR – have in a vehicle, and how each can solve the sensing needs of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving.

Recently, I had an interesting discussion with one of my friends, who knows I work with TI millimeter-wave (mmWave) sensors for radar in ADAS systems…

Coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) is a way of describing how an object, material or liquid changes size with temperature. It’s measured by calculating the percentage change in length of a material per degree change of temperature.

When heated, the molecules of a substance begin to vibrate and move away from each other, causing expansion; removing heat creates the opposite process. While all materials expand…

In a passive-entry-passive-start (PEPS) automotive system using Bluetooth® Low Energy technology, drivers enter their car and start the electric motor (or engine, in the case of an internal combustion engine) using a key fob that communicates with the car’s access systems, instead of a key.

Figure 1 shows a typical architecture of Bluetooth Low…

Imagine a commute to work where, with the press of a button, your electric car automatically drives up to you, opens its door to let you in, navigates on its own through traffic to find the quickest route, pulls up to a garage with automatic gates, parks itself in an available spot, drops you off and charges itself on its own while parked. With the advancement of electric self-driving…

A key selling point in new vehicles today is the technology. Where consumers have historically given preference to a car’s road performance, today, it is the performance of the electronics that has many consumers paying a premium, and this trend shows no sign of slowing down.

At the hub of a car’s technology is the infotainment system, conveniently located in the vehicle’s head unit in the center console, near the…

Collectively, we’re engaged in a worldwide effort to reimagine automotive and reduce emissions, whether it’s helping carmakers offload combustion engines or transition to fully electric fleets. Electrification has proven to be the most adaptable tool for reducing emissions, but as voltage increases within vehicles, as shown in Figure 1, so does the significance of…

Many safety related automotive systems are required to meet Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) as defined by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 26262.

It is a common misconception that integrated circuits (ICs) not developed following the ISO 26262 standards cannot be used to achieve functional safety goals. Many automotive…

From trade shows to TV commercials, by now we’ve all been exposed to the cutting-edge advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that are available in automobiles. While many automakers only offer these features in their luxury models today, mandates driven by the European Commission’s Safe Mobility initiative will bring them to the masses – in all new cars produced…