Automotive Electronics

Last week Belgian fabless chip company Melexis announced a unique inductive sensing IC that includes a tiny transformer, drive circuit and sense circuit, so Electronics Weekly decided to have a closer look. No permanent magnet, external or internal, is needed, and external magnetic fields are rejected. MLX92442 only requires a nearby electrically conductive object for triggering. It comes in either ...

Infineon has had its forthcoming TC4x automotive microcontrollers cleared for safe AI processing by the Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems (IKS). “Embedded AI is becoming increasingly important for safety-critical real-time applications,” said Infineon. “However, this also creates new requirements and standards that must be considered during the complete product lifecycle.” The TC4x family includes ‘PPU’ (parallel processing unit), an AI-accelerator ...

Programmierbare Logik & Systeme is offering debug and trace for NXP’s S32N55 16 core software-defined vehicle processor, announced yesterday. It is included in the 2024 version of UDE, the company’s universal debug engine. With UDE “the Cortex-R52 main cores and the Cortex-M7 auxiliary cores are all visible and can be controlled from one common debugger user interface”, according to PLS. ...

NXP has announced a real-time processor for vehicle central control computers with 16 1.2GHz Arm Cortex-R52 processors. Hardware isolation and virtualisation are provided to allow sharing of on-die hardware between different code blocks without interaction “to support the consolidation of cross-vehicle electronic control units in vehicle central compute applications”, said NXP. “Vehicle functions can be independently managed, including fault handling ...

Infineon has lined up a Rust programming language compiler for two of its TriCore architecture processor families: the existing TC3x and forthcoming TC4x. “Rust, with its unique memory safety features, has emerged as a viable complement or potential substitute for C/C++ in automotive software development,” according to the company. Working with Infineon, HighTec EDV-Systeme has released an ISO 26262 ASIL ...

TDK has announced automotive smart motor drivers that can handle 4 x 1A peak current and include an Arm Cortex-M3 processor core. HVC 5222D with 32kbyte of flash and HVC 5422D with 64kbyte can drive brushless dc, brushed dc (2A) and stepper motors. They also have 4kbyte ram, 2kbyte of emulated eeprom and 1kbyte of non-volatile registers, and are “SEooC ...

Automotive connectors play a crucial role in the circuitry of vehicles, as their dependability directly affects the overall functioning of the vehicle system. As the demands for automotive safety, environmental consciousness, comfort, and intelligence continue to increase, the requirements for automotive connector products have also intensified. These products now need to possess enhanced capabilities such as miniaturization, integration, resistance to ...

Infineon is aiming at automotive power control with a 5 x 7mm top-side cooled surface-mount package, pitching it against the 5 x 6mm bottom-cooled SSO8. The package, SSO10T, has a 10μm gap instead of a thermal pad on the PCB side, and around 95% of heat will leave through the top, according to the company, typically to the ECU housing ...

Panasonic Industry has introduced compact surface-mount electrolytic polymer hybrid capacitors that are “one size smaller than ZC series with the same capacitance” and AEC-Q200 compliant for automotive use, it said. Called the ZL series, the parts come in five case sizes from 5mm diameter (ø) x 5.8mm high (47 or 82μF), to 10ø x10.2mm (470 or 680μF). There are two ...

Würth Elektronik is promoting PCBs with press-fit power connectors as the interconnection technology of choice for high-voltage power distribution in mobile machines and commercial vehicles. It has a design service for vehicle companies seeking custom power distribution units that handle between 60 and 1,000V “that are compact, robust and can be flexibly configured”, it said. “Press-fit technology makes it possible ...