[Engineering Feature]
Semi ICs Drive Auto Safety And Control Innovation
To meet safety and energy mandates, as well as add value to their cars, automakers rely on a vast array of semiconductor chips to create safer, more intelligent, and more efficient automobiles.
In the never-ending battle to add more end-user value, the focus among automotive component and car manufacturers has turned to improving safety and control for vehicles. Driver assistance, collision prediction and avoidance, lane-departure warning, and electronic stability control (ESC) are just some of the systems getting a lot of attention these days.
However, “value” isn’t the only driving force behind these technological pursuits. Government mandates are putting the hammer down on manufacturers. Many of these requirements involve “greener” cars with higher fuel efficiency and reduced harmful engine emissions.
Both automotive IC suppliers and tier 1 suppliers see potentially large markets in automotive safety and control. All sorts of active and passive safety systems are in the works. According to several industry research firms, there’s large market potential in automotive electronics for safety and control. In fact, sensors, actuators, microprocessors, memories, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), microcontrollers (MCUs), and DSPs should see greater use in automotive safety and control systems. The trend is to increase the use of semiconductor ICs beyond control functions and into active and passive safety systems.
Increased use of real-time vision systems for advanced safety techniques has called for greater vision-processing capabilities. By installing cameras on cars and using high-performance image processors, auto manufacturers can implement systems for lane tracking, traffic-sign recognition, and parking assistance. When combined with radar, more robust obstacle detection becomes possible.
Devices with highly parallel architectures like NEC’s IMPCAR ASIC, with over 100 Goperations/s, allow for real-time, multiple image-processing applications within the same chip. Also, Analog Devices’ ADSP BF561 dual-core Blackfin processor allows parallel execution of instruction streams on multiple pieces of data, at a 600-MHz clock rate.
Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will see wide use in safety, fuel-economy, and convenience functions. “The need to consider the ‘system’ in MEMS is key to the success in introducing many sensor functionalities into vehicles,” says Roger Grace of Roger Grace Associates.
“This is clearly demonstrated by tire-pressure management systems (TPMSs), where an application-specific IC (ASIC) can provide many functions, including temperature compensation, control, battery management, and possibly even the transmit function to the display monitor in the vehicle cockpit,” Grace adds.
He also notes that a major obstacle for MEMS IC suppliers of devices for safety, control, fuel-economy, and convenience functions is to meet the enormous cost pressures imposed by car manufacturers and tier 1 suppliers, while delivering 100,000-mile, 10-year parts lifetime performance.
The challenge for auto makers is to add enhanced safety, comfort, and intelligence elements to their products while lowering costs. As cars take on more sensors and microcontrollers, the move is to implement “sensor fusion.” That involves integrating all of these ICs into central modules, which ultimately reduces complexity, lowers costs, and creates a safer driving experience.
Presently, many active and passive sensor and microcontroller ICs work independently of one another. “With sensor fusion, we’re trying to integrate things to reduce system complexity,” says Markus Staeblin, product marketing manager for automotive microcontrollers at Texas Instruments.
Marc Osajda, Freescale Semiconductor’s global automotive marketing manager, concurs with this trend. He also sees MEMS sensors enabling cost-effective and efficient ESC: “We see an emerging trend of sensor fusion that integrates passive and active systems for more intelligent vehicle control and a better understanding of a car’s environment. There are developments ongoing in sensor communications standardization to make all sensors compatible with an electronic control unit (ECU).”
Working with tier 1 supplier Continental, Freescale developed a custom MCU for ESC called SPACE (Superior Processor for Automatic Control in Electronic braking). The 32-bit electronicbraking system is said to be the industry’s first triple-core MCU design to integrate Freescale’s Power Architecture e200 cores with Continental’s fail-safe electronic braking system.
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