Skip navigation

community

Up to Blog Posts in Transportation | Automotive Electronics

Transportation

2 Posts tagged with the ftf tag
iLOVEautomotive
0

by Rainer Makowitz

RainerMakowitz.JPG

 

RADAR has been quickly adopted as the foundation of the new Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) that are being introduced by vehicle  manufacturers around the globe.

 

The RADAR technology has several benefits over other forward-facing  sensor technologies, like cameras. It can operate under adverse weather  conditions, can ‘see through’ objects to detect smaller targets and is  the primary method to determine speed of objects around the car. What  was used in police cruisers to provide hard evidence against speed limit  offenders has now come to be used as a preventive means to make driving  safer.

 

The choice of 76-81 GHz as the operating  frequency band was made by a standards organization to obtain  exceptional resolution and also to have a globally agreed frequency band  exclusively for this application.

 

At the Freescale Technology Forum (20-24 June, 2011) in San  Antonio, Astyx and Freescale demonstrated a high resolution 77GHz RADAR  sensor that is designed to be used in the next generation of automotive  ADAS systems. New technological advancements over conventional  automotive RADAR systems include:

- Digital beam forming using multiple receive channels
- Full 2D object detection
- High resolution in space and velocity
- Highly integrated RF components

 

Digital beam forming requires many receiver channels, which made it  costly and complex to implement in the past. This demo has implemented  unprecedented 16 receiver channels integrated into four Freescale BiCMOS  receiver chips driving high-resolution imaging. The high dynamics  requirements of automotive use case require fast frequency sweep in the  transmitter. The Freescale transmitter implementation represents the  market leading trade-off between frequency stability and fast sweep  operation.

 

The flexible Digital Beam Forming RADAR  sensor architecture designed  by Astyx allows several sensor ‘personalities’ (short range – up to  50m, or long range – 250m) to be defined by software options only.

 

 

Interested? Read the complete entry

484 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: in:automotive, sp:freescale, radar, ftf, driving, adas, advanced_driver_assistance_systems, astyx
iLOVEautomotive
0

by Cherif Assad

CherifAssad.JPG


I saw an exciting demonstration last week of an off-the-shelf electric car concept by Switzerland-based Michelin Research & Technic (MRT) at the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) in San Antonio, Texas. Called the Michelin Active Wheel System, it’s a “dressed” wheel inside the car fender that rotates depending on the road profile.

 

Analyst Rob Endrle shares his enthusiasm for Michelin’s wheel in action in a recent article. Here, I’ll get into some of the specifics around the technology that’s inside this crowd pleaser.

 

The wheel is equipped with motors for traction and suspension. The traction motor delivers 30kW of continuous power, although the second motor provides the suspension needed to lift up on bumps and stabilize the car depending on the road topology. Michelin MRT developed the motors, as well as designed the electronics and the battery pack that’s capable of handling several capacities ranging from 15KWh to 38KWh.

 

Now, about the electronics:  There is a set of two modules: one module is dedicated to manage the two front wheel motors of the car and the second module handles the active suspension on each side. The system can be extended to the rear for a four-wheel drive. One visitor from Asia made a comment that it fits pretty well with small electric cars.

 

The modules are powered by Freescale Qorivva MPC5643L microcontroller, a dual-core microcontroller with failsafe mechanisms dedicated for electric motor drive capability (PWM, analog-to-digital channels that are coordinated by a cross triggering unit). The MPC5643L operates either in lock step mode (LSM) or dual parallel mode (DPM)  should you need additional performance by a factor up to x 1.8. A power management device, Freescale’s MC33905 system basis chip (SBC), acts as the companion chip for intelligent power management and functional safety compliancy purposes.

 

 

Interested? Read the complete entry

1260 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: sp:freescale, ftf, mc33905, qorivva, mpc5643l, michelin