In connected car news are NI, Marelli, Continental and Abalta.
In this Article
NI In Novi
NI formally National Instruments, announced the opening of its new Engineering Innovation Center in Novi, Michigan. This state-of-the-art test center is designed to enable automotive manufacturers and suppliers to collaborate with NI’s experts on their EV components, such as battery cells and packs, and ADAS sub-systems, improving the quality and safety of the technology in today’s vehicles. Together with NI engineers, customers can improve the performance of their EV and AV products throughout the entire production cycle, ensuring the quality and reliability automotive customers demand.
The technology company ZF will, from 2025, purchase silicon carbide devices from STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM), a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications. Under the terms of the multi-year contract, ST will supply a volume of double-digit millions of silicon carbide devices that will be integrated in ZF’s new modular inverter architecture going into series production in 2025. ZF will leverage ST’s vertically integrated silicon carbide manufacturing in Europe and Asia to secure customer orders in electromobility.
Marelli DigiMate Digital Twin Highlighted with QNX
Marelli, announced that it will highlight DigiMate, its cabin digital twin, at the upcoming Shanghai Auto Show (April 18-27). This end-to-end infrastructure to replicate cabin hardware and software, accelerates vehicle software development, significantly reducing costs for automotive OEMs and allowing them to bring innovations to market faster.
Marelli’s DigiMate represents a breakthrough opportunity for OEMs to bring innovative connected vehicle services to market more quickly and efficiently. The technology is designed to streamline simulations, validation, and testing activities, eliminating the need for multiple physical cabins. Instead, the virtual cabin replica can run thousands of instances in parallel on the cloud, significantly reducing development timelines. Additionally, Marelli’s solution enables more cost-effective over-the-air software updates, allowing OEMs to respond quickly to new customer requests and significantly reduce time to market for new software updates.
In the first DigiMate application, QNX® Neutrino® Real Time Operating System (RTOS) has been integrated by Marelli to run natively on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) Graviton2 processors. This builds a cloud-enabled software development powerhouse that will tremendously boost OEMs’ efficiency in bringing products to market.
Yannick Hoyau, VP and Head of Engineering & Innovation at Marelli Electronic Systems, explains, “By combining the strengths of Marelli and AWS services, we can deliver the driving experience consumers want while ensuring security and reliability. The DigiMate empowers developers to reduce timelines and resources needed for software development, delivering software evolutions more efficiently and cost-effectively.”
“Enabling our customers with our foundational QNX software products in the cloud is a game changer for embedded developers as they will have easy access and scale available at their fingertips.” said Grant Courville, Vice President, Product Management and Strategy, BlackBerry QNX.
At the Shanghai Auto Show, Marelli will demonstrate how the DigiMate facilitates developer operations and boosts OEM profits. Attendees are invited to Marelli’s booth, 1.2H/1BF015, to experience this groundbreaking technology firsthand.
Continental Child Present Detection Funtiona & UWB
Technology company Continental has expanded its digital access system CoSmA by a Child-Presence-Detection function (CPD) for even more passenger safety. When the outdoor temperatures reach 30 degrees Celsius, in-car temperatures can reach up to 45 degrees within half an hour. This has the potential to be life-threatening for young children as researched by University of Georgia. As a consequence, nearly 40 children in the US die from heatstrokes in the car annually, according to the National Security Council. Continental’s Child Presence Detection function uses ultra-wideband (UWB) technology to prevent such tragedies in the future. It detects a child in the cabin and sends out a warning within seconds. The CPD function also addresses vehicle manufacturer’s needs to meet in-cabin safety targets in view of the upcoming Euro NCAP safety rating and US regulations, which are driving for new child safety requirements in the vehicle by 2025.
“We were first to market with the ultra-wideband for digital vehicle access. We are now using this technology to save lives by detecting left-behind children in a vehicle. With this approach we are also increasing value for our customers”, says Jean-Francois Tarabbia, head of the business area Architecture and Networking at Continental.
CPD is seamlessly embedded into the already existing CoSmA UWB Digital Access Solution, which enables drivers to use their smartphone as a car key for hands-free access. To be able to detect children who were left behind, the UWB system is working in a so-called reflective-mode. Thereby, it receives its own transmitted UWB signals back from micro motions of an object. By detecting a change in frequency or phase of a returned signal, distance and the velocity of the moving target can be measured. Even the tiniest motion like the movement of a child’s chest while breathing can be detected by the sensors.
Based on unique respiration rates and micro-body-movements, the CPD with UWB system can classify passengers as infants, children or adults. If children are left behind in the car, the CPD system can send an audible, visual or haptic alert to the driver after ten seconds at the latest. UWB based CPD is also able to detect infants and children in any seating position, no matter if they are covered by a blanket or stay hidden in the cabin-footwell.
Using CoSmA UWB transceivers not only for access solutions but also for CPD ultimately makes additional hardware redundant and allows overall system cost savings and simplification. As a pioneering solution, CoSmA continues to enhance and innovate user experience in vehicles of the digital age.
Continental brought the digital access solution technology CoSmA using ultra-wideband into the market in 2021 by digitalising the car key and integrating the access function directly into the driver’s smartphone. With its latest version, working with ultra-wideband (UWB) technology, CoSmA offers maximum convenience combined with significantly improved security against relay attacks (man-in-the-middle).
An advanced algorithm allows UWB transceivers to differentiate between an inside- and outside-location of the digital key centimeter-precise. This allows hands-free access and engine start without the driver having to pick up the smartphone. Vehicle owners can moreover create and manage multiple digital keys at the same time instead of passing on a physical key. A generated key can be conveniently shared with others.
Abalta Complies with ISO/IEC/IEE 29119
Abalta Technologies, Inc. (Headquarters: San Diego, California, CEO: Kenichi Kuwajima, hereinafter referred to as Abalta), a leading provider of connected vehicle software solutions, has recently declared tailored conformance to ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119 compliance. This certification recognizes Abalta’s commitment to meeting the highest quality standard in Software and Systems Engineering.
Under the leadership of Ernesto Marin, the newly appointed Director of Quality Assurance for the United States and Bulgaria offices, Abalta has undergone a rigorous self-evaluation process to ensure adherence to ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119 standards for software testing. The certification process includes testing definitions and concepts, testing documentation and testing techniques, ensuring Abalta’s software development practices are robust and reliable.
Ernesto Marin, Director of Quality Assurance for Abalta, said, “The charter of Quality at Abalta is ‘Empirical, not theoretical.’ Hence, using the standards in our development and testing operations will demonstrate we are a Center of Excellence for Quality.”
Abalta’s tailored conformance to ISO 29119 emphasizes it is a Center of Excellence in communicating organizational effectiveness and will continue to deliver high-quality products and services for its customers.