electronica 2014 AUTOMOTIVE CONFERENCE
Driving forces T
here is no doubt that the automotive industry is undergoing a technical revolution. The goal of cars that drive themselves, once purely in the domain of science fiction, is now an achievable reality. This is now being reflected in road cars that are taking more tasks away from the driver in a bid to make cars safer and put an end to road deaths.
"It will need intelligence
Lars Reger: "You don't want to be so distracted you drive the car into a ditch."
There is therefore no surprise that this year's
Electronica exhibition in Munich will be preceded by a one-day conference on Monday 10 November 2014 that brings together some of the top players in the automotive electronics industry who will be discussing the latest developments and the way forward. One of these is Lars Reger, vice president for
research and development at NXP Semiconductors. He will be presenting a paper looking at the safety and security aspects of having vehicles connected to each other and to the cloud.
"This all comes under the umbrella of the
internet of things," said Reger. "Cars are just expensive things."
He said the car needed to be connected
internally and to the outside world, and to portable devices using the likes of Bluetooth, NFC, Wifi and USB. Features that are becoming common on smartphones need to be recreated in the car.
"But you don't want to be so distracted you drive the car into a ditch," he said. "You need head-up displays and hands-free controls." He said NXP was planning some
demonstrations at the exhibition to show how a connected city would work, with say cars travelling at the optimal speed for upcoming traffic lights or how the traffic lights could be controlled to speed up the progress of an ambulance.
8 CIE electronica 2014
that is similar to a human being," he said. "A human being has a huge capacity and we are planning on doing something similar by developing specialised hardware accelerators that are highly parallel. The accelerator will have a huge amount of CPUs. Today we have prototypes and we are starting evaluation with OEMs and tier ones."
He said he could not see the first products being available before 2017 or 2018 due to the time that would be needed for qualification.
but the move towards that is bringing real features to cars today. "We are seeing more and more functions that will assist the driver," he said. "This will get car drivers used to the car taking over some of the functions." Singer will be doing a joint presentation with car maker BMW about car connectivity and the security issues that brings. "Once you have an online connection
through wireless, someone in China could hack a car in Munich," he said. "That's a big difference to needing a physical connection." He will be plugging the use of Ethernet as the main data network in the car rather than the Can bus or the Most infotainment standard.
"Can came from a time when they wanted
to reduce the number of wires," he said. "It wasn't really a data network, it was something to replace physical wires. But now there are complex blocks of data going round the car and there is an absolute need for a data network."
He criticised Most for never really being an open standard with multiple sources. "It has been something the industry has struggled with," he said. "It has not seen any influence outside the infotainment field. I have implemented a Most specification and it is pretty tricky. You have to know one of the ten people in the world who can help. That is the benefit of Ethernet – there is a lot of help out there."
Eric Pinton: "The car needs to gain intelligence and understand its environment."
The presentation with BMW will look at how Ethernet is being used for the camera system in the X5 and how he sees this growing in the future.
Steve Rogerson explores the key issues that will be raised at the automotive conference at Electronica in Munich
Eric Pinton, senior manager for automotive systems at Renesas, will use his paper at the conference to explore the key challenges that need to be faced in the move towards autonomous driving. "There are two challenges," he said. "The first is the car needs to gain intelligence and understand its environment. There are several technologies that can achieve this, such as cameras and radar. But they also need to get information that is not directly accessible by sensors, and for these it will need the cloud and car-to- car communications." This could include a detailed map of the area, traffic conditions, road works and anything else that could affect the journey. The second challenge, he said, concerned CPU performance.
"Autonomous driving is definitely a key item for this conference because there will be drastic changes," he said. "It will have a lot of impact on the way the car is architectured. It will affect the brakes and the steering system as they need to be completely controlled by electronics." Stefan Singer, FAE automotive director at
Freescale Semiconductor, believes fully autonomous driving is ten to 15 years away
The BMW X5 uses Ethernet for its camera system
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