Connected Car News: Rand McNally, Renesas, Lear Corp., onsemi, Continental, Ambarella, Hyundai Mobis & Bosch

In connected car news are Rand McNally, Renesas, Lear Corp., onsemi, Continental, Ambarella, Hyundai Mobis and Bosch.

Rand McNally Platform for Fleets

Broadening its reach further into the connected vehicle market, Rand McNally, a leader in innovative fleet technology,  announced the expansion of its highly flexible Rand Platform into additional field service markets.

The API-first platform, which already counts Toyota, Avis, and Aramex as customers, has several new, diverse offerings tailored for field service customers – from small to large fleets, from construction companies to Oil, Gas, and Mining operations.

“We are pleased to offer an expanded group of customers access to the Rand Platform,” said Adam Ricketts, V.P. of Product at Rand McNally. “Our platform has been designed to very simply fit the unique business needs of companies, rather than have customers adhere to a set of predefined features that may not fit their unique business needs.”

With a number of automated features that ease fleet onboarding complexities – such as automatic VIN decoding – and the platform’s powerful drag-and-drop business rules engine – to easily set up any alert or exception reporting required – the Rand Platform has unlimited options in a no-code environment for better managing vehicles, drivers, and assets.

“The savings fleets can achieve with the Rand Platform are remarkable. Our customers have experienced a dramatic uptick in safety as well as cost savings in a variety of areas,” Ricketts continued.

Among the benefits that existing customers have experienced with the Rand Platform:

  • A 45% reduction in fleet maintenance and administration costs,
  • An 80% drop in speeding violations among drivers, improving safety,
  • And a 99% recovery in stolen vehicle and equipment assets.

Solutions

The Rand Platform and its powerful solutions are supported by best-in-class hardware options for secure vehicle telematics, driver safety and coaching, and asset tracking. All data from the hardware is available on the Rand Platform, which is a single sign-on ecosystem, enabling customers to manage their entire fleet operation in one place.

Hardware on the Rand Platform includes:

  • Vehicle Telematics: Rand McNally’s GX6 device is the company’s connected vehicle device. With multiple connectivity options, from OBDI to OBDII to J-Bus, the GX6 has up to 1GB of on-board memory – more than any other device on the market. This is especially helpful for fleets operating in parts of the world where cellular connectivity may be irregular. The device comes with both internal antenna and external antenna variants, capable of receiving signals from multiple GPS satellite networks and connecting across a large spectrum of cellular bands.
  • Driver Safety: Driver and vehicle safety is enabled with Rand Video Telematics (RVT), a best-in-class MV/AI dash camera with road-facing and optional cab-facing camera. The RVT, via the Rand Platform, enables the monitoring of road-facing risky driving behaviors such as tailgating, collision detection, unsafe cornering, harsh braking, and sudden speed increase. Leveraging RVT, can help improve safety while reducing insurance costs.
  • High-Value Asset Tracking: The company’s TrueTrack® asset trackers include a battery option, a solar-powered device, as well as a wired version for customers who require constant location tracking with alerts/pings every two minutes.

With the move into field services, Rand McNally has tailored its tiered platform subscription offerings to meet the goals of all companies, from small fleets concerned with vehicle and driver tracking, to larger enterprise operations developing services and integrations using the platform’s powerful APIs.

Renesas’ Radar

Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, is entering the automotive radar market with the introduction of a 4×4-channel, 76-81GHz transceiver designed to meet the demanding requirements of ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) and Level 3 and higher autonomous driving applications. Leveraging automotive expertise accumulated through years of global customer engagements, Renesas will incorporate the new RAA270205 high-definition radar transceiver into its growing sensor fusion portfolio, which combines radar, vision systems, and other sensing modalities.

Designed in cooperation with Steradian Semiconductors Private Limited, which Renesas acquired earlier this year, the RAA270205 is featured in a Renesas product showcase at electronica, Munich, Germany, November 15-18, 2022. The new transceiver MMIC (monolithic microwave integrated circuit) is especially suited for imaging radar, long-range forward-looking radar and 4D radar, but can also be used for corner and central-processing radar architectures, the so-called “satellite” automotive radar systems. Equipped with 4Tx and 4Rx channels, the RAA270205 supports up to 16 MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) channels. It can be cascaded to enable higher channel count and better radar resolution.

The RAA270205 features best-in-class accuracy with up to 5GHz of bandwidth, and a 112.5MSPS ADC (analog-to-digital converter) sampling rate that is nearly three times faster than competing devices. Power consumption of 1.2W is 50 percent lower than comparable transceivers and it delivers a noise figure of 9dB, which is 3dB less than other radar transceivers. Its superior chirp rate of up to 300MHz/µs improves radar resolution and object detection.

“Today’s radar transceiver MMICs must achieve higher definition to support the high-accuracy requirements of ADAS and autonomous driving safety platforms,” said Vivek Bhan, Senior Vice President and Deputy General Manager of Renesas’ Automotive Solution Business Unit. “Working in close collaboration with Steradian, which brings deep radar design expertise, we are expanding our sensor fusion offerings with a focus on functional safety and low power consumption to help our customers lower their development costs and improve time to market.”

RAA270205 Winning Combinations

Renesas has plans to combine the RAA270205 transceiver with other compatible devices from its portfolio to support automotive radar systems. These Winning Combinations will include the “Satellite Radar System for AD/ADAS,” which will be available in Q2/2023. Renesas Winning Combinations are technically vetted system architectures from mutually compatible devices that work together seamlessly to bring an optimized, low-risk design for faster time to market. Renesas offers more than 300 Winning Combinations with a wide range of products from the Renesas portfolio to enable customers to speed up the design process and bring their products to market more quickly. They can be found at renesas.com/win.

Availability

The RAA270205 will be available in 1Q/2023 in sample quantities, with commercial production planned for 2024. The transceiver is available in a small, easy-to-integrate eWLB (embedded wafer-level ball-grid array) package, measuring only 7.6 x 5.6mm. It will be fully compliant with automotive industry requirements such as IATF 16949, AEC-Q100 Grade2 and ASIL B.

Lear Corp. Buys InTouch Automation

Lear Corporation (NYSE: LEA), a global automotive technology leader in Seating and E-Systems, announced the strategic acquisition of InTouch Automation, a supplier of Industry 4.0 technologies and complex automated testing equipment critical in the production of automotive seats.

onsemi new MOSFET

onsemi (Nasdaq: ON), a leader in intelligent power and sensing technologies,  announced a series of new MOSFET devices that feature innovative top-side cooling to assist designers in challenging automotive applications, especially within motor control and DC/DC conversion. The company is showing the new devices at its booth 101 in hall C4 at electronica, the world’s leading trade fair and conference for electronics.

Housed in a TCPAK57 package measuring just 5mm x 7mm, the new Top Cool devices feature a 16.5mm2 thermal pad on the top side. This allows heat to be dissipated directly into a heatsink rather than via a typical printed circuit board (PCB). By enabling the use of both sides of the PCB and decreasing the amount of heat going into it, the TCPAK57 provides increased power density. Improved reliability of the new design adds to an overall extended system lifetime.

“Cooling is one of the greatest challenges in high power design and successfully addressing it is the key enabler to reducing size and weight, which is critical in modern automotive design,” said Fabio Necco, vice president and general manager, Automotive Power Solutions at onsemi. “With excellent electrical efficiency and having eliminated the PCB from the thermal path, the design is significantly simplified while reducing size and cost.”

The devices deliver the electrical efficiency required in high power applications with RDS(ON) values as low as 1mΩ. Additionally, the gate charge (Qg) is low (65 nC), reducing losses in high-speed switching applications.

This solution leverages onsemi’s deep expertise in packaging to provide the highest power density solution in the industry. TCPAK57 initial portfolio includes 40V, 60V and 80V. All devices are capable of operating at junction temperatures (Tj) of 175°C and are AEC-Q101 qualified and PPAP capable. This, along with their gull wings that allows inspection of solder joints and superior board level reliability, makes them ideally suited to demanding automotive applications. The target applications are high/medium power motor controls such as electric power steering and oil pumps.

Samples of the new devices are available now with full-scale manufacture planned in January 2023.

Continental Will Offer CV3 AI ADAS from Ambarella

In the future, Continental will offer Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) solutions based on the “CV3” artificial intelligence (AI) system-on-chip (SoC) family from semiconductor company Ambarella. The high-performance, power-efficient and scalable SoC portfolio, which is built for ADAS applications, complements Continental’s solutions for assisted driving and further advances vehicle automation. The more sensors that are installed in a vehicle, the greater the amount of data collected to detect the environment. The joint solution with centralized single-chip processing based on 5-nanometer technology enables the next generation of vehicles to process the environmental perception of multiple sensors even faster, thanks to the increased performance level. Sensor solutions include high-resolution cameras, radars, lidars as well as ultrasonic sensors. The integrated SoC enables early data fusion, in which the information from different sensors is processed simultaneously for various applications such as emergency brake assist, parking or cruising.

“After exchanges on different use cases with Ambarella for two years, Continental is now integrating its high-performance, low latency, and low-power processing chipset into our assisted driving solutions. This brings our ADAS systems to the next level and helps to serve the growing amount of sensor data in the vehicle. With this, we achieve a more comprehensive and accurate environmental perception,” said Frank Petznick, Head of the Autonomous Mobility Business Area at Continental. “We have now combined our expertise in this field to offer an enhanced level of systems performance as well as the scalable solutions required by the market.”

Significant impact for industry and degree of vehicle automation

Continental’s driver assistance systems enhanced with Ambarella’s SoCs can process more collected data faster. In this way, they increase precision and enable a larger range of functions. The high scalability of the system-on-chip family allows vehicle manufacturers to choose the necessary performance level for their system requirements using the same vehicle architecture.

Despite the higher performance and accuracy, the solution consumes less power. This also leads to fewer cooling efforts, making sustainable energy savings possible, while also reducing system costs. As an added value to vehicle manufacturers, they can reduce their engineering investments across all vehicle types.

Unique system-on-chip performance with low power consumption

Ambarella’s fully scalable, power-efficient family of system-on-chips provides significant AI performance per watt for neural network computation, with a performance increase of over 40 times compared to its former semiconductor chip family. Additionally, Ambarella integrates its image signal processor technology into all SoCs. This results in robust ADAS systems with higher levels of environmental perception in challenging lighting, weather and driving conditions for both machine and human vision. Humans see through the sensors of the assistance system.

Continental’s ADAS systems with the integrated system-on-chip will be showcased for the first time at CES 2023 in Las Vegas.

Hyundai Mobis’ Quick Men Selection Menu

On November 17, Hyundai Mobis (KRX: 012330) announced that it has developed Quick Menu Selection, the world’s first proximity detection pop-up display. Also known as Menu Pre Information technology, it applies a proximity sensor on in-vehicle displays to minimize cumbersome screen manipulations allowing the user to select frequently-used menus effortlessly.

Quick Menu Selection automatically opens pop-up menus that are often used when a user’s hands are in close proximity to the screen. By bringing the hand close to the screen, it activates the proximity sensor that is integrated with the display. Users can also use a simple swipe gesture to access the desired menu.

Hyundai Mobis developed these technologies to enhance convenience and safety of driving. This is the first use case in the world to deploy infrared ray (IR) sensors, which have been widely used in a variety of products, into in-vehicle position sensing.

Hyundai Mobis Quick Menu Selection uses time difference light sensing technology to minimize the number of sensors required, and applies automatic calibration (monitor calibration) technology based on a detection algorithm that improves accuracy in the detection of hand gestures and the direction of movement. To make it more intuitive and easier for users, Quick Menu Selection is also combined with responsive UX and UI solutions, which detect the distance and position of objects.

Based on the improved gesture system, Quick Menu Selection significantly simplifies the vexing manipulation process of having to tap on touchscreens multiple times. Whereas before, touchscreen displays were unable to sense the user’s intention before the user tapped on the desired menu, Quick Menu Selection allows for the application of interfaces for various user scenarios depending on the direction of movement and hand position.

Bosch Invests in Chip Manufacturing

Bosch is also systematically readying itself for further growth: in July 2022, the company announced it would be making billions of euros of new investments in its own semiconductor business. At locations such as Dresden and Reutlingen, this money will enable Bosch to establish new engineering centers in the coming years. The company is also steadily expanding its manufacturing operations so that it can meet the further increase in customer demand. For example, the 300-mm wafer fab in Dresden, which went into operation in 2021, is already expanding its clean-room area after just one year. Major expansions are also underway in the existing clean-room spaces for 200-mm wafers at the Reutlingen location. In Malaysia, the new test center in Penang will be completed in 2023; the existing test center in Suzhou, China, was expanded in 2021.