Connected Car Tips: Tesla, Ford, HERE, On Semi, Mentor, Seeing Machines, Sony, Wind River & Hitachi

There are connected car news tips this week from Tesla 3, Ford, Argo AI, HERE, On Semi, Mentor, Seeing Machines, Sony, Wind River and Hitachi.

Home on the Longer Range for Tesla 3

An EPA document shows that the Model 3 with has a range of 310 miles on a charge, the EPA cycle testing showed 334 miles of range. Tesla, however, requested it lowered that to the official range of 310 miles.

 Ford’s Argo AI has purchased Princeton Lightwave produce LiDAR.

With the addition of the Princeton Lightwave team, Argo is uniquely positioned to innovate in both sensor hardware and the interface between sensor and software — enabling us to achieve performance improvements that would not otherwise be possible. Princeton Lightwave’s technology will help us unlock new capabilities that will aid our virtual driver system in handling object detection in challenging scenarios, such as poor weather conditions, and safely operating at high speeds in dynamic environments.

HERE Goes Autonomous with Mitsubishi

HERE Technologies and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced their intention to link their technologies for autonomous vehicles into a powerful integrated offering for automakers.

According to their preliminary agreement, the companies aim to offer services to support cars with ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) on the road today right through to the fully autonomous vehicles of the future. The companies’ initial focus is on providing services that, for example, would support smart lane-level guidance for vehicles based on real-time information about traffic conditions and incidents. They will also evaluate how information from vehicle sensors gathered by MELCO can be utilized for high-definition map updates.

Accordingly, the companies intend to draw on their respective technologies, including: HERE’s mapping infrastructure for autonomous cars, HD Live Map; HERE’s Open Location Platform; and MELCO’s precise positioning technology, High-Definition Locator, for data processing, location analytics and the creation of new services.

HERE and MELCO intend to enable services initially for automotive customers in North America and Europe, before making them available more broadly. The companies will also work together to define possible services that target other industries beyond the automotive market.

On Intros 2.3 Mp CMOS

ON Semiconductor driving energy efficient innovations, has introduced a new 1/2.7-inch 2.3 Megapixel (Mp) CMOS digital image sensor with an active-pixel array of 1936H x 1188V. The AR0239 produces extraordinarily clear and sharp digital images in challenging bright and low light conditions. This, along with its ability to capture continuous video and single frames, makes it an ideal choice for many applications, including security and surveillance systems, body cameras and vehicle DVRs (dash cameras).

Key attributes of the AR0239 include superior low-light performance, robust near Infrared (NIR) quantum efficiency (QE) and the capability to capture high dynamic range scenes. The highly sensitive 3-micrometer (μm) x 3 μm Backside Illuminated (BSI) pixels with improved NIR process, that include ON Semiconductor’s DR-Pix™ technology, give a 21 percent improvement in responsivity and a 10 percent improvement in QE versus the device’s predecessor.

The sensor features a variety of sophisticated camera functions such as in-pixel binning and windowing, and it has an on-chip analog to digital converter (ADC) that supports both 10-bit and 12-bit architectures. When operating in linear mode with a serial interface, the device offers fully HiSPi/MiPi compatible HD support up to 1080p at 90fps, thereby delivering excellent video performance. Two- or three-exposure 1080p HDR output is available at up to 30fps.

Mentor’s Tessent MissionMode with On-Chip IP

Mentor, a Siemens business, today announced the availability of its new Tessent MissionMode product, which provides a combination of automation and on-chip IP for enabling semiconductor chips throughout an automotive electronics system to be tested and diagnosed at any point during a vehicle’s functional operation. This capability is fundamental towards achieving the safety and long-term reliability requirements demanded by the ISO 26262 standard.

Tessent MissionMode provides the infrastructure for system software-based access to any test and diagnosis capabilities integrated within an automotive chip. An in-system test (IST) controller integrated into the chip drives an internal IEEE 1687 (IJTAG) access network to communicate to any IJTAG-compliant IP. In particular, the IST controller fully supports all Tessent design-for-test (DFT) products including memory BIST, logic BIST, and EDT logic. The IST controller also provides a communication path to outside the chip through a generic CPU interface. This interface can be easily adapted to work with any CPU bus protocol typically used in automotive systems like Ethernet, CAN or I²C. The on-chip infrastructure is highly programmable, allowing any number of different test sequences to be applied as needed. Tessent MissionMode tool automates the integration and full verification of this infrastructure as well as automates the generation of all CPU instructions necessary to run any tests and extract any diagnostic results.

car2go Goes Mercedes CLA

car2go, the largest, fastest-growing one-way carsharing service in the world, today announced that it is upgrading its Seattle fleet to be fully comprised of compact Mercedes-Benz CLA and GLA vehicles. car2go expects the Seattle fleet’s transition to be completed by the end of 2017.

Seeing Machines Sees for Caddy Hands Off Wheel Autonomous Driving

Seeing Machines an industry leader in computer vision technologies which enable machines to see, understand and assist people, announces the automotive production debut of its FOVIO driver monitoring technology in the 2018 Cadillac CT6.  The FOVIO based driver monitoring system (DMS) forms an integral part of General Motors’ industry leading Super Cruise hands-free driving system for the highway, ensuring safe and confident vehicle operation.Determining driver attention state is accomplished through a precise measure of head orientation and eyelid movements under a full range of daytime and night-time driving conditions including the use of sunglasses. If the driver looks away from the road or closes their eyes for more than a few seconds, a light bar integrated into the steering wheel will flash to guide the driver’s attention back to the road. If the system determines that the driver is continuing to ignore the road, intentionally or otherwise, a series of escalating visual, audible, seat vibration alerts are employed. This is followed, eventually, by an automatic safe stop of the vehicle if the driver does not, or cannot, return their attention to the road.

Sony Releases IMX324 CMOS

Sony Corporation announced the release of the IMX324, a new 1/1.7-type stacked CMOS image sensor equipped with the industry’s highest resolution 7.42 effective megapixel RCCC filter^*2 for forward-sensing cameras in advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Sony will begin shipping samples in November 2017.

The image sensor is capable of approximately three times the horizontal resolution of conventional products, enabling high-definition image capture of distant objects such as road signs of up to 160 meters away. Moreover, the sensor is equipped with a pixel binning mode^*5 achieving the high level of low lighting sensitivity of 2666 mV. This capability enables the capture of images such as pedestrians or obstacles, even in dark situations. The sensor is equipped with a unique function that captures dark sections at high-sensitivity settings as well as bright sections at high resolution alternatively, enabling high-precision image recognition when combined with post-signal processing.

Sony is providing another industry-first innovation with the efficient stacked design of the IMX324. The pixel array and signal processing circuit is layered allowing for a compact size and low power consumption while still delivering the industry’s highest resolution.

WindRiver vRANS

To accelerate the introduction of cost-effective vRANs, Wind River has collaborated with Altiostar, Amdocs and Dell EMC to develop a pre-integrated, validated end-to-end solution, ready for deployment by service providers.

Altiostar contributed their vRAN solution, which comprises a software-intensive LTE eNodeB combined with Ethernet fronthaul. Amdocs provided their Network Cloud Service Orchestrator (NCSO), an open, catalog-driven service orchestration solution, while their professional services expertise is also available for designing, deploying, operating and optimizing mobile networks. The solution leverages the Dell EMC PowerEdge R630, an ultra-dense, two-socket 1U rack server based on the latest Intel® Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family. Finally, Wind River’s Titanium Cloud platform is the industry’s only fully integrated, ultra-reliable, deployment-ready family of virtualization platforms that enables service providers to deploy virtualized services faster, at lower cost and with guaranteed uptime.

Allego EV Cloud Services from Microsoft Azure

Charging solution provider Allego and Microsoft join forces to provide companies a broad portfolio of online services to manage their current or new charge points and start new services to their customers. Both companies built the EV Cloud Services Platform that empowers companies to create interoperable services: at home, at work and on-the-go. The EV Cloud Services Platform of Allego is based on the Microsoft Azure technology.

EV market becomes more connected
Allego and Microsoft both see that the e-mobility market gets more and more interconnected. Vehicles, charging infrastructure, location services, cross border mobility, payment systems all become more interrelated and will lead to a smart services network that provides an integrated and seamless driver experience. As the EV market is at the tipping point of becoming a mass market, there is an exponential increase in data and transactions expected. The platform and the EV services are highly scalable to cope with that on a multi country bases.