Since my first car was among the least expensive available when I made my purchase, I thought I would see what innovations are available today in that class. The lowest-priced sedan in the United States (according to my non-scientific web search) is the 2006 Chevrolet Aveo, with a starting manufacturer’s suggested retail price under $10,000. It has safety features including front and side airbags. I also learned that you can, in fact, still buy a car without power windows and power door locks, but an AM/FM stereo and air conditioning are included as standard features. Not bad. More than I expected.
I was pleased, but not too surprised, to see that side airbags were part of the base package. Safety features have historically made their way up and down the automotive model food chain faster than anything else – sometimes by mandate, sometimes as a differentiator.
A Safe Assumption
Safety may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you’re thinking about automotive innovations. You can’t really see it, and you’re increasingly bombarded by infotainment and comfort features that can do anything from give you directions to a restaurant, entertain your kids, heat your seats, or play 1,000 of your favorite songs sorted any way you like.
But don’t sell safety short. Some of the coolest things happening in the industry are designed to keep you secure as you travel from point A to point B. From a development point of view, safety is one of the safest places for technology innovators to invest, as it’s somewhat immune to the ups and downs in the health of the industry. When times are tough, as they were at the beginning of our young century, safety platform development often continues while other more conceptual projects are postponed until funding can ramp back up.
Not all innovation is devoted to revolutionary systems. Development continues in mainstream safety applications like ABS and airbags as well. For example, work is underway to increase the intelligence of airbag sensors by altering their deployment based on variables such as passenger weight. The implication of having more and smarter airbags is that we have more sensors located throughout the car, all of which need to be monitored by a central control unit. Additional software layers in these systems are increasing the performance overhead to the point where it now makes sense from a cost point of view – because of both the geometry and the software – to migrate away from the old-school 8-bit 8051 generation microcontrollers in favor of 32-bit embedded processors. Once that move is made, there is an additional advantage to using an open architecture.
The migration away from proprietary solutions has worked well for companies that have taken a leadership role in promoting industry standards. ARM’s involvement in the AUTOSAR initiative, for example, has led to widespread adoption of its cores for both ABS and airbags. Freescale Semiconductor has championed another standard, the FlexRay protocol, for by-wire automotive systems. Freescale developed the industry’s first Flex-Ray device – the MFR4200 controller. FlexRay improves capabilities currently offered by CAN, enhancing communications, enabling a network architecture, and allowing for deterministic system behavior, which is crucial for safety-critical applications.
Another automotive innovation that falls in the safety bucket is intelligent fuses, which can massively improve the reliability and performance of your car’s battery. Today, when you turn the key in your car, you apply power across every component in the vehicle at the same time, creating a spike or surge in your battery. An intelligent fuse box treats your car more like a network, enabling a gradual, organized start of all elements in the system that softens the peak load on the battery.
When you need to accelerate beyond what you can program into software, companies like Celoxica, with their C-based design and synthesis tools, allow you to accelerate your algorithm into hardware using a software-like design methodology. Next-generation stability control systems enabled by these hardware-accelerated solutions are finding their way into the ultra-high-end vehicles today, using advanced sensor technology to take control of your car if, for example, you are steering too tightly on a slippery surface. Sensors can also work in concert to maximize your vehicle’s grip through a turn, helping to address the danger of rollover in sport/utility vehicles.
Looking to the future, Jeff Jussel at Celoxica explains that the idea of “sensor fusion” can be extended, eventually leading to auto-piloting of your vehicle. Essentially, your car would have a “brain” created by the fusion of all of the sensors in the system, and it would work with the other cars on the road (also equipped with this technology) to keep you safe. You may enter a highway, and the car will “insert” you into the flow of traffic. It will know how fast you’re going, the road conditions, it will even be able to see the stripes on the road as they’re passed. (It’s at this point in the story when one car – owned by a mad embedded systems scientist – gets a mind of its own and tries to take over the planet…).
Such applications obviously require massive real-time digital signal processing capability, and strain even today’s best technologies to the limits. Moving the performance-critical components of these processes into high-end digital signal processors may not be enough. At that point, we need dedicated, custom hardware to handle the problem. That’s where programmable hardware can come into play.
Extending programmability beyond software and into hardware has become more important as market windows continue to shrink, and FPGA vendors are responding. Earlier this month, Xilinx announced that they have expanded their offering for automotive to include the both the cost-sensitive Spartan family and a Virtex-4 device that includes configurable DSP48 slices and PowerPC. All of the devices have passed industry requirements including ISO TS16949 certification, and are offered in both extended temperature and industrial temperature ranges. (Press release.)
Actel notes that the automotive market is actually very conservative with product acceptance for volume production. Much of the early technology is deployed in the “non-car” segment of the market. “Search work often starts off in high-end commercial applications, where the volumes are in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions,” says Martin Mason, director of silicon product marketing at Actel. Actel has created a line of low-power, Flash based applications to deal with increasing thermal issues, particularly for in-dash applications. (FPGA Journal article.)
Let Me Entertain You…
Who needs a night on the town when you can be entertained right in the comfort of your own…car. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a little thing called “infotainment,” and it’s going to change the way you think about your car.
Now the software environment gets more complex, with more layers and more pervasive use of real-time operating systems (RTOS). Companies like Wind River, with their Eclipse-based development suite, are winning fans in the automotive world. Their Platform for Automotive Devices combines the Wind River VxWorks RTOS with an open device software development suite and middleware to help address the specific challenges faced by telematics developers.
Telematics is also an area where technology is hurtling us forward at an amazing pace. The bells and whistles are ringing and blowing so quickly that car manufacturers are hesitating to “marry” technology to the car, fearing it will look old too quickly. For example, a navigation system from three years ago in a high-end luxury car may now look archaic. It may have a (gasp) black and white screen. It may not load quickly or speak to you in a friendly voice. It may not be remotely upgradeable.
What can be done about this? One possibility would be to create a portal environment that allows you to keep your system up to date. In its simplest form, it would include an interface like USB on the dash where you could plug in anything from a firmware update to your MP3 player. Now your system is as up to date as you are.
Because it is a robust and well-established interface, USB will have a place in the high-volume market right out of the chute. The low cost of implementation makes USB a great fit with any automotive demographic from the Ford Focus to the 7 series BMW. Another interface angle is offered by a product like Microsoft’s Windows Automotive, which provides support for voice- and data-enabled Bluetooth. If you have a Bluetooth-enabled device (most newer mobile phones would qualify) you can “share information” with your car. Information sharing is even happening in infrastructure. For example, Xilinx deploys their Spartan 3 FPGAs in the Microsoft telematics platform.
Satellite radio is an interesting area to watch in the infotainment space. Services like Sirius and XM are working hard to make themselves attractive to a broad market. They offer features like removable, dockable units, and they’re working on developing content that can be tailored for your trip. For example, if you have little kids in the car, and you’re going on a 30-minute ride, you might be able to choose a 30-minute Disney show for them to listen to (and, in the future, watch). The viability of this technology will be influenced by two distinct forces – ease of use and content. Embedded systems designers can only do so much. The rest is up to Howard Stern and Disney.
I’ll Take You There
Navigation systems, while technically under the umbrella of infotainment, are another area of dramatic possibilities for technology innovation. Opportunities abound for improvement in this space, with obvious evolutionary elements like ease of use, reliable verbal interface, and trustworthy mapping.
The future holds some exciting possibilities for navigation that will require a whole new approach to system complexity. For example, ARM, NEC, and NVIDIA are involved in an initiative to create a symmetric multiprocessing platform that will target the very high-end navigation and infotainment market. “In Japan, the road system is not based on a grid, making it quite confusing to get around,” says Wayne Lyons, director of embedded solutions at ARM. “Next-generation 3-D mapping techniques are being created that will draw your route as well as upcoming landmarks in real time.” To pull this off, the system will have to look like a high-end video game, with a tremendous processing requirement. Information would be held on a DVD or a hard-drive system, translating in real time based on your movements.
It Keeps Going, and Going, and Going
Not to be missed in all the hubbub are innovations in fuel efficiency enabled by embedded systems. Ah, the promise of hybrid technology. Being the proud owner of a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid, I can say from direct experience that it is rewarding to drive these cars. It’s exhilarating to watch your mileage climb right before your eyes on the digital readout. Passengers watch the dash, mesmerized as the energy source moves from gas to electric. You can see the batteries charging when you coast or brake. The user interface on the Honda is a strong marketing tool for the technology, demonstrating the value of this important innovation in real time. And for those wondering if you have to plug it in (you would be amazed at the number of people who ask me…), no. The system is designed so that the battery is charged while the car is running, in a closed-loop process.
With today’s higher fuel prices, there is even pressure to add plug-in capability to these systems, saving fuel when a cheaper electrical power source is available. All of these enhancements, of course, increase the demand on control systems for power management, battery charging and monitoring, and motor control. The resulting fuel efficiency is more a tribute to the capabilities of embedded computing technology than to thrifty motors and batteries.
From safety to convenience to fuel economy, embedded systems innovations are creating a new generation of smart, safe, fun cars. Of course, we don’t all want or need the same features in our vehicles. Some of us want a basic car with basic features that will get us from place to place. Some of us want to visit a Bayside Mitsubishi Dealership to find the best car with the most advanced features so we look really good going from place to place. Most of us want something in the middle.
This brings us to an industry conundrum. How do you match the technology you design into your vehicle to your target market? The problem becomes particularly tricky because the youngest, most techno-savvy buyers tend to purchase the lower-end, higher-volume cars, but most of the technology you’re rolling out will originate in the high-end, low-volume models.
If you have the answer, there’s probably a big job waiting for you with the Tier 1 supplier of your choice.
