In connected car news are SoundHound, OHMs, Castrol, XiNG, Renesas, Vulong, Autofutura, GForces, Veoneer, AVL, Swiss Re, COPAN, DTS, Factorial Energy and AMD.
More SoundHound Languages
SoundHound Inc., the leading innovator of voice AI and conversational intelligence technologies, has announced the expansion of its Houndify Voice AI platform to 22 languages—covering a majority of the world’s common languages. Now, developers employing Houndify can add conversational intelligence to their products and services for users across the globe. The company also announced plans to add over 100 languages and variations as part of its commitment to provide the most comprehensive voice AI solution to brands and users everywhere.
Global companies seeking to create omnichannel voice experiences can now access the majority of the languages their customers speak, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Indian-accented English, German, Dutch, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, Polish, Swedish, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, and more.
OHMs Sonic Energy Safer Li-On Tech
OHMs Technologies, long recognized as a leading provider of advanced electrolyte products for next-generation lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, announced its relaunch as Sionic Energy, transforming its business to deliver complete advanced battery cell designs that incorporate its breakthrough technologies into a drop-in, rapidly commercialized, low cost, high performance, safer Li-ion technology.
Sionic’s silicon battery cell designs incorporate the company’s complete technology innovations that deliver up to 50% greater energy density, 30% lower cost, and increased safety, and can be integrated into cylindrical, pouch, or prismatic cell formats in existing cell production supply chains and infrastructure.
Most silicon battery designs currently available or under development require expensive materials and complex processes that can significantly increase costs. Sionic Energy’s innovations utilize pure low-cost micron silicon, integrated with advanced electrolyte designs for exceptional performance, cycle life and increased safety. Sionic Energy’s battery design is agnostic to cathode materials, enabling the extensibility of performance across a variety of current and emerging cathode designs.
As part of this transformation Ed Williams, NOHMs’ Company Chairman, Acting CEO, and 15-year battery industry executive will assume the position of CEO and guide the company through its accelerated growth strategy into the automotive, consumer electronics, and aviation battery markets. With Williams at the helm, Sionic Energy is on track to have its battery design ready for production and commercialization in light aviation (drones) and consumer electronics sectors by late 2022.
“With the world depending on lithium-ion batteries to power our devices, our vehicles and our infrastructure, battery performance, cost and safety have become more critical metrics for success and progress than ever,” said Williams. “Through collaboration with the exceptional team at NOHMs, our launch of Sionic Energy unites their legacy electrolyte technologies with our recently acquired high-capacity silicon anode technology, from the University of Colorado Boulder, to create a truly market disruptive battery. We’re looking forward to addressing the market’s growing demand for a drop-in, next generation, lithium-ion battery technology.”
Based on the ease of integration into existing battery production, supply chains, and products, Sionic Energy has created a licensing model for its battery technology to accelerate and broaden adoption by major commercial markets. Production-scale prototype cells will be available in Q4 this year for customer evaluations and testing.
In commercializing these latest silicon anode technologies, Sionic will collaborate with Professor Sehee Lee’s lab and team of postdocs at the University of Colorado Boulder. Over the past decade at the university, Dr. Lee’s team has created a legacy of Li-ion battery innovations that help drive the adoption of energy storage in products and their positive impact on climate change.
“The market’s urgent need for next-generation Li-ion battery performance and safety at a lower cost is well documented across every major product category: electric vehicles, consumer electronics and aviation,” said John Chen, investor, board member, and Managing General Partner of Phoenix Venture Partners LLC (PVP). “Sionic Energy’s disruptive combination of high performance at an attractive cost point with ease of commercialization and scaleup positions their silicon battery technology well to power next-generation products relying on better battery technology to reduce contributions to climate change.”
Castrol Partners with XING
Castrol has today announced a partnership with XING Mobility to further develop its immersion cooling battery technology, offering unprecedented power and safety for the rapidly growing electric vehicle market.
Since 2015, XING Mobility, a pioneer in immersion cooling technology, has continued to advance its battery system and powertrain technologies, setting itself apart from competitors by providing automotive-grade systems to early adopters of the technology. Its breakthrough technology directly submerges widely available lithium-ion battery cells in a e-thermal fluid. Castrol’s recently launched product, Castrol ON e-thermal fluid is circulated through XING Mobility’s battery system with a dynamic flow rate to provide superior battery thermal management that enables improved efficiency, and is especially designed to meet the highly challenging specifications, conditions and safety demanded by these applications.
Castrol provides the oils, fluids and lubricants the world needs, for every driver, every rider and every industry. The world of transport is going electric and the recently launched Castrol ON e-Fluids has a critical role to play in the era of e-mobility. Castrol ON’s advanced range of e-fluids helps bring the industry closer to achieving the key tipping points for mainstream electric vehicle (EV) adoption by helping them go further¹, charge faster² and last longer³ *. This new partnership with XING Mobility will mean Castrol can benefit from XING Mobility’s adaptability and innovative spirit, while XING Mobility will benefit from Castrol’s pioneering fluid research and expertise. The two will work together to optimise fluid and hardware to improve battery system performance in electric vehicles.
SiFive RISC-V
The SiFive Intelligence platform, based on SiFive RISC-V Vector processors with AI ISA extensions, features a differentiated software toolchain to enable the development of scalable solutions for AI and ML applications. SiFive RISC-V processors are pre-integrated with advanced trace, debug, and security solutions compatible with industry tools to simplify heterogeneous integration and migration. The SiFive RISC-V portfolio is silicon-proven and available in leading and advanced manufacturing foundries, offering flexibility for customers and partners.
Renesas & SiFive
Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, and SiFive, Inc., the industry leader in RISC-V processors and silicon solutions, today announced a strategic partnership to jointly develop next-generation, high-end RISC-V solutions for automotive applications. The partnership will also include SiFive licensing the use of their RISC-V core IP portfolio to Renesas.
Vulog & UNESCO City Tools
Vulog and UNESCO have announced their partnership to develop a “Smart and Inclusive Cities Tool,” a project that will focus on the impact that mobility and technology have on fostering inclusivity for vulnerable populations in cities across the world.
Transportation and mobility at the forefront of conversations around smart, inclusive cities
Transportation, fueled by the emergence of new information technologies, has a significant impact on the sustainability and inclusiveness of the world’s cities. UN estimates suggest that cities are responsible for 75% of global CO2 emissions, with transportation being among the largest contributors. Transportation also makes up the second-highest cost on the average family’s budget and can affect an individual’s ability to be employed, the combination of which places a disproportionate burden on communities that are already marginalized.
The Covid-19 pandemic has transformed the way we think about transportation and mobility, altering the frequencies, distances, and ways in which we move. It has also underscored the importance of transportation and personal mobility in the development of cities especially when it comes to safety and efficiency. Women are, in this respect, especially vulnerable since they have a higher chance of facing safety issues such as harassment and assault during their daily commutes. People with disabilities also face greater challenges than their non-disabled counterparts: the few transportation and mobility options available are often inconvenient and inefficient.
The Smart and Inclusive Cities Tool, proposed by Vulog and UNESCO’s International Coalition of Inclusive and Sustainable Cities – ICCAR, is a collaborative project that addresses this issue by examining the effect of new urban mobility technologies and identifying best practices to build awareness and strengthen cities’ capacities in creating smart and inclusive ecosystems.
Autofutura and GForces
Two of the automotive industry’s leading retail software suppliers, Autofutura and GForces, have merged to form a new group. With the rapid acceleration of the digitisation of the automotive sales process, the companies have come together to maximise sales efficiency and improve the way consumers buy cars.
Veoneer Emotion 3D
The automotive technology company Veoneer, Inc. emotion3D, a leading pioneer in camera-based in-cabin monitoring software solutions, and AVL, a global leader in automotive development, testing and simulation, today announced their collaboration to develop the world’s first personalized and situation-aware restraint control technology system.
Current passive safety systems, such as airbags follow a “few-sizes-fit-all” development approach and thus perform best for a small number of specified body physiques – the most common one is the “average male”: 175 cm, 78 kg. This is suboptimal for everybody who deviates from these averages – children, elderly people and even woman. A study conducted by the University of Virginia found that seatbelt-wearing female occupants are 73% more likely to suffer from serious injuries than seatbelt-wearing male occupants. As long as passive safety systems cannot distinguish between the occupant’s individual characteristics it is impossible to achieve optimal protection for everybody.
The “Smart-RCS” project is conducted within the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Fast Track to Innovation funding program.
Over the next 24 months, the project partners will develop an innovative restraint control system able to personalize the actions of passive safety systems in event of a crash. Using a 3D sensor for understanding the vehicle interior, the system will consider a wide range of relevant, personal and situational factors such as body physique, position and pose, weight and gender.
Veoneer & Swiss Re
The automotive technology company Veoneer, Inc. and insurance company Swiss Re are pooling their knowledge and vast experience on road safety technologies to further enhance the evaluation and development of advanced driver-assistance technologies (ADAS) and related services.
Yearly, almost 1.4 million lives are lost, and 50 million people are injured on roads globally. ADAS has shown huge potential in reducing the number of road crashes and mitigating the number of fatalities and severe injuries.
In 2019 Swiss Re launched the ADAS Risk Score with the aim of creating a vehicle-specific insurance rating, taking driver assistance systems into account. Swiss Re and Veoneer share a mutual interest in gaining the best possible insights into the safety effects of ADAS in order to further improve and tailor the performance of such systems to drivers’ habits, and accurately evaluate them.
Through this partnership, Veoneer will enhance its ADAS technology using Swiss Re’s empirical knowledge of real-world performance of ADAS systems based on insurance-relevant insights and comprehensive approach to risk modelling. A better understanding of how a vehicle is driven in a contexts, such as differing road or weather conditions, will reveal the opportunities and limitations of current systems more in detail.
At the same time, Swiss Re will benefit from Veoneer’s expertise on ADAS hardware and software technologies. This information will feed into the Swiss Re ADAS Risk Score to the benefit of car manufacturers. Consequently, insurers will gain from being able to assess the latest car safety technologies for insurance purposes.
COPAN Launches UniVerse
COPAN Diagnostics, Inc. is excited to announce the North America launch of UniVerse™. UniVerse™ revolutionizes up front sample processing for molecular diagnostics automatically managing accessioning, labeling, vortexing, and aliquoting into various secondary assay tubes or 96-well plates. From the inventors of WASP®, WASPLab™ and pioneers of Artificial Intelligence Algorithms for microbiology, PhenoMatrix®, COPAN has developed a fully automated instrument that manages molecular specimens prior to processing by different downstream molecular diagnostics platforms. UniVerse™ is fully LIS interfaced, it increases laboratory throughput with complete traceability, reliability and accuracy.
Factorial Energy in Stealth Mode
Factorial Energy (“Factorial”), the breakthrough solid-state battery technology company, announced its emergence from stealth mode to introduce the first 40 Amp-hour solid-state battery cell for electric vehicles (EVs) and other applications. Factorial also announced the appointment of senior industry leaders with deep technical and automotive experience to its leadership team.
Factorial Energy is naming Joe Taylor as Executive Chairman. Taylor, the former Chairman and CEO of Panasonic Corporation of North America, played a key role in the development of the Tesla-Panasonic relationship, which resulted in Panasonic investing in the Tesla Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada. In addition, the former Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes-Benz, Dieter Zetsche, is also joining the company’s advisory board.
DTS Nueromporphic Driver Monitoring Solutions
Using the raw feed from the Metavision – Event-Based Vision sensor, the DTS AutoSense* team developed driver-centric monitoring features such as gaze tracking, head pose, identification, and eyelid opening.
With more than 20 years of world-leading experience in neural solutions and computer vision, and with billions of products powered by their solutions, the Xperi team maps and adapts in-cabin monitoring (ICM) technologies to existing and future sensor centric trends.
“Intelligent sensing is required by the next-generation in-cabin experience. The critical path to this is a sensor fusion-focused advanced research strategy,” said Petronel Bigioi, chief technology officer, Xperi. “DTS AutoSense’s advanced research team is centered on state-of-the-art sensing solutions and neuromorphic sensing is one of the technologies that can shape the future of the industry.”
The neuromorphic sensors capture information at an equivalent frame rate of 10,000 frames per second without requiring active illumination. This enables better low light performance for driver monitoring features as well as never-before-seen capabilities such as saccadic eye movement or micro-expressions, crucial next steps in the next-generation in-cabin experiences.
Xperi relies on an end-to-end data generation and training system built to address the particular needs of the sensor. The training data set was generated based on Xperi’s extensive computer vision infrastructure, reusing ground-truth from the visible and near infrared spectrums, synthesizing a completely novel approach in neuromorphic based sensing.
-Skyworks Solutions, Inc. (Nasdaq: SWKS), an innovator of high-performance analog semiconductors connecting people, places and things, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Silicon Laboratories Inc. (Nasdaq: SLAB), a leading provider of silicon, software and solutions for a smarter, more connected world, under which Skyworks will acquire the Infrastructure & Automotive business of Silicon Labs in an all-cash asset transaction valued at $2.75 billion.
AMD and Ansys 3rd Gen AMD EPCY
AMD and Ansys are collaborating to help engineering organizations across every industry spur new product design by substantially improving modeling run times. Data centers powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors are enabling engineers to produce superior designs with unprecedented speed — delivering high quality products to rapidly address new market opportunities.
Engineers face increasing pressure to complete design cycle times sooner. However, a large portion of engineering simulations require overnight runs. The rising complexity of these simulation workloads increases the need for high-performance computing (HPC) resources, which increasingly rely on more performant parallel processing and processor architecture capabilities. Through internal testing, AMD demonstrated that its new EPYC 75F3 processors could reduce specific Ansys simulation runtimes by up to a factor of two1.
From improving the energy efficiency of gas turbines with Ansys’s computational fluid dynamics software to enhancing automotive safety with Ansys’s explicit dynamics software, AMD EPYC processors empower engineering teams to execute extreme scaling of computationally demanding applications and rapidly design leading-edge products. It is expected that Ansys simulations will soon run even faster with the upcoming U.S. Department of Energy’s exascale supercomputers, which will be built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and used by Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, integrating AMD EPYC processors to produce high-fidelity models. This will supply engineers with insights into how products like autonomous vehicles, aircraft and medical devices will virtually behave across millions of real-world operational scenarios.
“3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors provide leadership performance for HPC workloads and we’re incredibly excited to collaborate with HPE and Ansys to enable the HPC industry to run a fantastic combination of HPC, server infrastructure and simulation software to push the design envelope further than before,” said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Business Group at AMD. “Working together, AMD and its technology partners are helping to drive HPC to new heights that will help tackle problems that have previously been beyond humanity’s reach.”
Modeling at exascale will empower engineers to analyze considerably more data in less time and solve extremely sophisticated design challenges.
“HPC and AI workloads are becoming more compute and data-intensive, requiring higher performance and specialized capabilities,” said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager of HPC at HPE. “By combining Ansys’ software capabilities to target simulation goals with AMD’s powerful generation of EPYC processors, HPE is further optimizing systems to support business and research missions to improve accuracy in simulations and advance designs and models.”
AMD EPYC processors’ technological advancements enable engineering organizations of all sizes to solve demanding simulation workloads.