automotive News - Page 22 of 33 - CNX Software

January 8, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

NVIDIA Xavier AI SoC Now Sampling, DRIVE IX & DRIVE AR SDKs Announced

Well over a year ago, NVIDIA introduced Xavier, their next generation self-driving and artificial intelligence processor, with eight custom ARM cores, a 512-core Volta GPU, and support for 8K video encoding and decode. A few months ago, the company provided some more details and unveiled NVIDIA DRIVE PX Pegasus A.I. computer for level 5 autonomous driving with two Xavier processors and two NVIDIA next-generation GPUs delivering a total 320 TOPS of computing power. For that it’s worth, 320 TOPS is about 3200 times more powerful than Intel Movidus Neural Network Compute Stick. CES 2018 has now started, and NVIDIA made several announcement related to gaming and automotive markets, and confirmed Xavier is now sampling to select customers. What’s really new from the announcement is the addition of two new SDKs (software development kits) for the processor beside the original NVIDIA DRIVE AV autonomous vehicle platform: DRIVE IX – Intelligent experience […]

December 22, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Renesas R-Car M3 Starter Kit is Designed for ADAS Applications

Most boards targeting the automotive market are impossible to purchase by individual, so last year I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered Renesas R-Car M2 Porter Linux automotive infotainment development board was available for sale on Digikey, and had good documentation on eLinux.org. The company has now introduced another automotive board, namely R-Car V3M starter kit, that’s not designed for infotainment, but instead for ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) or even AD (Automated Driving) applications. Specifically, the board is supposed to “accelerate the development of New Car Assessment program (NCAP), front camera applications, surround view systems, and lidars” leveraging the company’s R-Car V3M image recognition SoC. Renesas R-Car V3M starter kit (V3MSK) specifications: SoC – Renesas R-Car V3M processor with two Cortex A53 64-bit cores @ up to 800 MHz, a dual lockstep Cortex-R7 32-bit core @ up to 800 MHz, IMP-X5-V3M image recognition engine System Memory – 448KB RAM on-chip; […]

November 23, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Prologium Lithium Ceramic Solid State Batteries Don’t Catch Fire, Nor Explode

You must have read articles or watch videos showing laptop or smartphone battery explode, and Lithium-ion batteries are considered hazardous enough that they are banned from airplane without the proper paper work. Such batteries can catch fire or even exploded when overcharged, or physically damaged. We have protection circuits for the former, and physical damage seldom happens, so in most cases the batteries are safe, and that’s why they are still used in laptops and phones. However, if you need maximum safety, Lithium ceramic battery (LCB) may be the way to go. Those are still Lithium-ion battery cells, but they replace the liquid polymer separator found in Li polymer battery (LPB) by a solid-state ceramic electrolyte, and you can mistreat them almost as much as you like with overcharge, cut them, bend them, and they won’t catch fire, nor explode. One company that makes such batteries is Taiwan based Prologium […]

October 11, 2017October 11, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

NVIDIA DRIVE PX Pegasus Platform is Designed for Fully Autonomous Vehicles

Many companies are now involved in the quest to develop self-driving cars, and getting there step by step with 6 levels of autonomous driving defined based on info from Wikipedia: Level 0 – Automated system issues warnings but has no vehicle control. Level 1 (”hands on”) – Driver and automated system shares control over the vehicle. Examples include Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Parking Assistance, and Lane Keeping Assistance (LKA) Type II. Level 2 (”hands off”) – The automated system takes full control of the vehicle (accelerating, braking, and steering), but the driver is still expected to monitor the driving, and be prepared to immediately intervene at any time. You’ll actually have your hands on the steering wheel, just in case… Level 3 (”eyes off”) – The driver can safely turn their attention away from the driving tasks, e.g. the driver can text or watch a movie. The system may ask […]

September 26, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linaro Connect SF 2017 Welcome Keynote – New Members, Achievements, the Future of Open Source, and More…

Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017 is now taking place until September 29, and it all started yesterday with the Welcome Keynote by George Grey, Linaro CEO discussing the various achievements since the last Linaro Connect in Budapest, and providing an insight to the future work to be done by the organization. The video is available on YouTube (embedded below), and since I watched it, I’ll provide a summary of what was discussed: Welcoming New Members – Kylin (China developed FreeBSD operating systems) joined LEG (Enterprise Group), NXP added LHG (Home Group) membership, and Xilinx joined LITE (IoT and Embedded). Achievements OPTEE open portable trusted environment execution more commonly integrated into products. Details at optee.org. LEG 17.08 ERP release based on Linux 4.12, Debian 8.9 with UEFI, ACPI, DPDK, Bigtop, Hadoop, etc… LITE group has been involved in Zephyr 1.9 release, notably contributing to LwM2M stack More projects to be found […]

September 19, 2017September 19, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Mictrack MT600 4G GPS Tracker Supports Traccar, OpenGTS, and Other GPS Tracking Platforms

Cellular GPS trackers have been around for a few years, but so far mostly 2G or 3G GPS trackers with products like Ping, Particle Asset tracker, and many other models selling on Aliexpress. 4G GPS tracker have been less common. However, recently we’ve seen platforms like Wio LTE and AutoPi that could handle GPS tracking over LTE connectivity, and another alternative would be Mictrack MT600 that ready-to-use solution to track your car or other vehicle with GPS and 4G. Mictrack MT600 hardware specifications: GNSS U-BLOX7 GPS Chip GPS sensitivity -162dBm Channel – 56 Positioning Accuracy – 10m Cold start: 30s; warm start: 15s; hot start: 1s SMA antenna connector Cellular Connectivity Qualcomm 4G LTE chip MT600-A model (North America): 4G FDD LTE: 700/850/1700/1900MHz 3G UMTS: 850/1700/1900MHz GSM: 850/1900MHz MT600-C model (Asia): 4G FDD LTE: 900/1800/2100MHz 4G TDD LTE: 1900/2300/2500/2600MHz 3G UMTS: 900/2100MHz GSM: 900/1800MHz MT600-E (Australia/Asia/Europe) 4G FDD LTE: 800/850/900/1800/2100/2600MHz 3G […]

September 14, 2017September 14, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

NXP RoadLink SAF5400 is a Single Chip Secure DSRC/802.11p V2X Platform

Marvell unveiled 88W8987xA wireless SoC for V2X (Vehicle to Everything) applications supporting 802.11p WiFi, and DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communications) last June, but NXP has recently launched Roadlink SAF5400 which it claims to be the world’s first “automotive qualified, high-performance single-chip DSRC modem” Key features for Roadlink SAF5400: Compliant with IEEE 802.11p, IEEE 1609.4 Compliant with: ETSI EN 302663 – Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS); Access layer specification for Intelligent Transport Systems operating in the 5 GHz frequency band ETSI EN 302571 – Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS); Radiocommunications equipment operating in the 5 855 MHz to 5 925 MHz frequency band; Harmonized EN covering the essential requirements of article 3.2 of the R&TTE Directive Compliant with ARIB T-109M – 700 MHz Band Intelligent Transport Systems Single channel handling for 802.11p reception/transmission. Includes Channel Switching Optional ECDSA verification: 2000 messages/sec (Brainpool/NIST curves 256 bits) Qualified in accordance with AEC-Q100 grade 2 Host […]

September 10, 2017September 11, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

UFS 3.0 Embedded Flash to Support Full-Duplex 2.4GB/s Transfer Speeds

All my devices still rely on eMMC flash for storage, but premium smartphones, for example, make use of UFS 2.0/UFS 2.1 flash storage with performance similar to SSD, with Samsung UFS 2.0 storage achieving up to 850MB/s read speed, 260 MB/s write speed, and 50K/30K R/W IOPS. UFS 3.0 promises to roughly double the performance of UFS 2.0/2.1 with transfer rates of up to 2.4 GB/s, and separately, the UFS Card v2.0 standard should deliver UFS 2.1 performance on removable storage. Several Chinese and Taiwanese websites, including CTimes and Benchlife, have reported that companies have started getting UFS 3.0 & UFS Card v2.0 licenses from JEDEC, and Phison is working on a controller to support both new standards, and scheduled to launch in 2018. Premium smartphone SoC are only expect to support UFS 3.0 in 2019 and beyond, and hopefully by that time eMMC will have been replaced by UFS 2.0/2.1 […]