TRAILBLAZING TRENDS
By T Murrali8 | AutoPartsAsia | FEBRUARY 2018
Cars Consume(r) Electronics
J
anuary is a month of exciting
exhibitions. Until a few years
ago the automotive industry
had been looking forward to
the Detroit Motor Show to see new
vehicles and vehicle technologies.
With the dominance of electronics
and software in vehicles, the
global automotive industry is more
enamoured of the Consumer
Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
There has been a tangible turning
away from the traditional Detroit
show. Though CES is primarily
for consumer electronics, as the
name suggests, the automobile
manufacturers and component
suppliers throng to it in increasing
numbers year after year. Some of the
players have been participating for
many years; Visteon Corporation,
for instance, has been there for the
last 19 years in a row, perhaps one
of the longest in the participation
history of any automotive technology
company.
At CES 2018, Visteon unfolded its
‘DriveCore’ autonomous driving
controller, a hardware/software
platform that enables automakers to
build autonomous driving solutions
quickly in an open collaboration
model. It also showcased a plastic
OLED (organic light-emitting diode)
instrument cluster with 1920-by-
resolution, in vivid colours and ultra-
thin (5 mm) profile.
Climo, a micro-climate monitoring
system from Bosch, was another
interesting technology exposition
at CES. Climo helps cities manage
air-quality parameters in real time
and at a lower cost than the existing
technologies. The tiny box enables
rapid and accurate measurement of
data.
Bosch won the CES 2018 Innovation
Award in the Smart
Cities category. Bosch developed
the Climo system in collaboration
with Intel. It combines sensors
and software to deliver a range of
air-quality data, covering key air
pollutants such as particulate matter,
carbon monoxide, nitric oxide,
nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide
and ozone. It also provides data
on environmental parameters like
temperature, relative humidity, light,
sound, pressure – and even pollen.
This makes it a valuable and viable
solution for cities and countries in
different weather zones and with
different economic environments.
Originally, it was developed by Bosch
engineers in India.Assisted & Automated Driving Control
Unit, exhibited by the German
conglomerate Continental, is a
highly flexible computing platform
for automated driving system that
has to process huge amount of data.
Developed by Continental’s San
Jose R&D centre in collaboration
with Xilinx, San Jose, the Assisted
& Automated Driving Control Unit
enables its customers to get to
market faster by building upon
the Open Computing Language
(OpenCL) framework, standardized
by the Khronos Group, a consortium
focused on the creation of open
standards for graphics, media and
parallel computation.
From the OEMs side, Nissan unveiled
a research finding that will enable
vehicles to interpret signals from
the driver’s brain, redefining how
people interact with their cars. The
company’s Brain-to-Vehicle, or B2V,
technology promises to speed up
reaction time for drivers and will
lead to cars that keep adapting
to make driving more enjoyable.
This breakthrough from Nissan is
the result of research into using
brain decoding technology topredict a driver’s actions and detect
discomfort. The company used a
driving simulator to demonstrate
some elements of the technology at
CES.Yet another German company,
ZF, presented a modular, scalable
hardware and software architecture
for the fully automated driving
applications. ZF has developed
its ProAI technology together with
NVIDIA. A Chinese car manufacturer
will be the first customer to install
the control box in a vehicle with
autonomous driving features, thanks
to a collaborative project among ZF,
NVIDIA and Baidu.
In order to shape the mobility of
tomorrow, it is necessary to integrate
products and services into a
completely unified, intelligent system
that is an open platform. For this, ZF
introduced its cloud-based platform
for innovative mobility services
at the show. The cloud solution
will make it possible to integrate
different functions – ranging from
fleet management and ride-sharing
to innovative delivery services – into
one shared intelligent platform,
regardless of the service provider.
For developing its initial application
samples, ZF collaborated with
startups and innovative mobility
suppliers.Moving away from CES, I am taking
to sensational startups. Denso and
Kyoto University Startup FLOSFIA
is set to develop a Next-Gen Power
Semiconductor Device for Electrified
Vehicles. The objective is to improve
the efficiency of EV power control
units, a key to drive widespread EV
use, and usher in a future of safer and
more sustainable mobility.See you next month with more
Trailblazing Trends...