In Embedded chips and connected car news tips this week include Intel, Comma.ai, HARMAN, Qualcomm, Karma, SmartDrive Systems, Divergent 3D, Active Hours, Magna, Cadence Design, Mentor Graphics, Microchip, INRIX, Infineon, Green Hills Software and Savari.
Comma Comments to NHTSA – NO Way
Comma one becomes “period” after NHTSA – Comma one an aftermarket product for ADAS was cancelled after head hacker Holz recieved a letter from NHTSA requesting information about the after market self-driving/safety system called Comma.ai.
HARMAN & Airbiquity
On October 31, HARMAN and Airbiquity will introduce the first automotive grade, end-to-end intrusion detection system. HARMAN’s Intrusion Detection and Prevention System inside the vehicle, paired with Airbiquity’s cloud-based Choreo service delivery platform and Software & Data Management offering, are complementary technologies delivering automakers and their customers a powerful and complete connected vehicle security threat detection and response capability.
LA AutoMobility Reminder
There’s only two weeks left until AutoMobility LA (formerly the Connected Car Expo). AUTO Connected Car readers who register for AutoMobility LA can use the coupon code ACCN2016 to save $200 off the AutoMobility Conferenece. The conference features more than fifty thought leaders across 20-sessions, including four highly-anticipated keynotes.
Qualcomm 5G Modem
Qualcomm Technologies announced the Qualcomm Snapdragon X50 5G modem, making Qualcomm the first company to announce a commercial 5G modem chipset solution. It is designed to support original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that are building the next generation of cellular devices, as well as aid operators with early 5G trials and deployments.
The Snapdragon X50 5G modem will initially support operation in millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum in the 28GHz band. It will employ Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna technology with adaptive beamforming and beam tracking techniques, which facilitates robust and sustained mobile broadband communications in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments. With 800 MHz bandwidth support, the Snapdragon X50 5G modem is designed to support peak download speeds of up to 5 gigabits per second.
Karma Grand Opening in Troy
Karma Automotive held the Grand Opening of its Troy, Michigan Technical Center located at 1875 Research Drive yesterday. Attendees included many government officials and suppliers to the auto company. Troy Mayor, Dane Slater, joined Jim Taylor, Karma’s Chief Revenue Officer along with Senator Marty Knollenberg, Congressman David Trott and Representative Martin Howrylak for the ribbon cutting.
SmartDrive SmartIQ
SmartDrive Systems, a leader in driving performance solutions that reduce collisions and improve fuel efficiency, announced that SmartIQ Transportation Intelligence Suite, which transforms massive volumes of data generated by commercial fleets into real-time actionable information, received the Business Intelligence Group’s BIG Award for Business and was named 2016 New Product of the Year. In recognition of the SmartDrive solution’s industry leading attributes, including its modern data architecture, real-time video integration and advance visualization capabilities, Business Intelligence Group selected SmartIQ as a leading product in the transportation technology sector.
Divergent 3D & Altran
Divergent 3D, a manufacturing technology company focused on the automotive sector, has entered into a global development partnership with engineering research and development firm Altran. Under the agreement, Altran has invested in Divergent 3D and will provide support to accelerate implementation and licensing of its manufacturing technology platform across the continent as part of Altran’s new vehicle architecture initiatives. Together, the companies will help automakers harness the power of 3D printing to unleash design innovation while slashing costs, time-to-market and environmental impact.
Activehours for Uber
Activehours, the company that helps people get their pay when they want it, today announced it has integrated with the new Uber driver API to give driver partners quick access to their earnings.
With this integration, Uber drivers who have the Activehours app can access pay as soon as they earn it, instead of waiting for the next pay cycle. Additionally, while drivers previously had to submit screenshots to verify information to access payment, with the new API, the information is shared with Activehours with drivers’ permission through the app, and drivers can get paid instantly.
Activehours gives users more power and flexibility in how they’re paid compared to the traditional bi-weekly pay cycle. Anyone can download the app and sign up for Activehours, which is already working with people from over 10,000 companies. Activehours is community supported, meaning people decide what to pay based on what they think is fair and what they can afford.
Magna Driver Assistance for Ford Super Duty
Magna International Inc., a world leader in camera-based driver-assistance systems, announced today its vision-based driver-assistance technologies are featured in the 2017 Ford Super Duty Trailer Reverse Guidance system.
Magna’s EYERIS driver-assistance technology supports the Trailer Reverse Guidance system jointly developed by Magna and Ford. Image-processing software determines the angle between truck and trailer and provides the most appropriate view to the driver, depending on the trailer’s trajectory. Three high-resolution cameras and a color-coded bird’s-eye diagram of the truck help warn the driver of potential jackknife conditions. Additional technology shows the driver the required steering wheel movement for reversing in a straight line.
Cadence Tool Confidence
Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced that it has delivered the industry’s first comprehensive Tool Confidence Level 1 (TCL1) documentation that is compliant with the automotive ISO 26262 standard. To be deemed compliant, TÜV SÜD, an internationally accredited independent testing and conformity assessment company, completed an evaluation and confirmed the TCL1 predetermination for the Cadence® analog/mixed-signal tool chain and digital front-end design and verification flows. In addition, an evaluation of the Cadence digital implementation and signoff flow is expected to be completed by the end of year. Once complete, more than 30 Cadence EDA tools will contribute to an ISO 26262 compliant development lifecycle, offering the broadest tool support for the automotive industry.
ARI Driver Insights
ARI a leading global fleet services announced the new ARI Driver insights app.
Available for iPhones and iPads, the app enables drivers to monitor their vehicle’s information and will send important updates to the driver through push notifications.
Mentor Graphics & Telemotive AG
Mentor Graphics Corporation announced a joint engineering and marketing agreement with Telemotive AG, a Magna International company and a leading automotive supplier of engineering services and tech products. The heart of the agreement will be the integration of Mentor’s Volcano VSTAR AUTOSAR stack with Telemotive’s Power Line Communication (PLC) – two technologies which together provide key software building blocks to automotive suppliers creating electronic control units (ECUs) that allow for smart charging of electric vehicles.
Smart charging, which includes transmission of data via charging cables, allows for secure payments at the burgeoning network of for-pay public charging stations around the world. Telemotive has long been a leader in the space, providing a software stack supporting error-free communication between a charging column and vehicle. The modular software, compliant with the international standard governing communication between plug-in vehicles and electrical supply equipment (ISO 15118), can be integrated into every relevant ECU.
Mentor Graphics CFD
Mentor Graphics Corporation announced the only fully-embedded computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solution for Solid Edge software, a mainstream computer-aided design (CAD) solution developed by Siemens’ product lifecycle management (PLM) software business. Solid Edge customers can now take advantage of Mentor Graphics® FloEFD™ frontloading CFD product to simulate fluid flow in their design process. The FloEFD solution is especially well suited for use during the design process as it reduces overall time to a solution by as much a 65%-75% compared to other CFD tools.
Mentor Graphics’ award-winning FloEFD CFD solution automates the most onerous CFD steps which include transferring model geometry to the CFD application, modeling internal cavities if needed and creating a “mesh.” The FloEFD CFD technology takes the geometry directly from the CAD application, automatically performs the necessary translations and cavity modeling, and generates an optimized mesh before executing analysis. This approach provides accurate analysis results quickly thus enabling designers to validate their designs early and often. It also allows the designer to explore a succession of ideas without risking project deadlines.
Microchip LIN
The industry’s first automotive-grade Local Interconnect Network (LIN) System-in-Package (SiP) solution including a microcontroller with integrated touch hardware support is now available from Microchip Technology Inc. a leading provider of microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog and Flash-IP solutions. The SAMHA1GxxA microcontroller family contains capacitive touch hardware support, an event system and complex PWM capability. The series is ideal for touch button, touchpad, slider, wheel or proximity sensing applications, including optical and haptic feedback.
The SAMHA1GxxA contains an ARM® Cortex®-M0+ microcontroller (MCU), a LIN transceiver based on Microchip’s fourth-generation LIN IP and a voltage regulator. The system solution comes in a 7 × 7 mm QFN package, with wettable flanks ready for automatic optical solder inspection and is available with 16k, 32k or 64k Flash memory, up to 8 KB SRAM and 2 KB Read-While-Write Flash.
INRIX & IdealSpot
IdealSpot, the leader in demand driven site selection and evaluation, announced a collaboration with INRIX, the world leader in transportation analytics and connected car services, to bring data-driven decisions to the real estate industry.
With INRIX, IdealSpot now has access to the most robust driver network in the world that includes 300 million vehicles and devices, covering nearly 5 million miles of roads, ramps and interchanges. INRIX real-time and historic data has weekly, daily, and hourly vehicle counts that are broken down by direction and average vehicle speed. Combined with IdealSpot’s best-in-class location analysis solutions, including geo-located demand data, the commercial real estate industry now has a powerful tool to inform every aspect of a commercial real estate transaction. Business owners, landlords, developers, and commercial real estate service providers can all use the IdealSpot platform to make smarter real estate decisions.
Infineon Designer
Starting at electronica 2016, Infineon Technologies introduces Infineon Designer: the first online prototyping engine combining analog and digital simulation functionalities in an internet application. Requiring a web browser only, it is a perfect match for supporting customers in selecting the right product for a defined application. Infineon Designer works intuitively in a very short time, and neither installation nor licenses are needed.
Infineon Designer features a wealth of application circuits in the domain of Industrial Power, Lighting, Motor Control and Mobile/RF frontend design. It enables analog/digital co-simulation of the 32-bit XMC1000 industrial microcontroller ARM® Cortex®-M0 series, using the free-of-charge code generation platform DAVE. The digital prototyping engine Infineon Designer aims at making the transition from idea to functional system as smooth and fast as possible. It allows for prototyping a “soft evaluation board” with all functional parameters. In an early stage, hardware for testing and iterations can thus be saved.
Green Hills Architecture
Green Hills Software, the largest independent software vendor for the Internet of Things (IoT) announced industry-leading processor performance for the new ARMv8-R architecture. The Green Hills Optimising C/C++ Compilers achieved class-leading benchmark scores for ARM® Cortex®-R processors, as published by ARM Ltd., and certified by the EEMBC® consortium. The Cortex-R52 processor is the first instantiation of the ARMv8-R architecture and targets a diverse range of systems that demand advanced safety features with real-time efficient execution. The Green Hills compilers unlock these hardware capabilities for maximum performance and functional safety for next-generation microcontroller applications ranging from surgical automation to industrial safety to automotive powertrain.
Savari in China
Savari Inc. announced that the company has signed an agreement with SAIC USA Inc. (Fully owned subsidiary of Chinese automaker SAIC Motors) to manufacture and distribute the company’s V2X communications solutions in the Greater China and selected ASEAN Coutries.