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Today’s automobiles include more electronics features and functions than at any time in history. From engine controller to crash sensing and passenger protection, all the way to automated driving, a complex network of electronic sensors and controls is being integrated into most of the vehicles. While many of these are necessary for increased comfort, convenience and safety, they must also be designed for the stringent quality requirements compared to standard consumer electronics. The business driven need for miniaturization with increased functionality but at reduced cost necessitates use of high density interconnection with advanced electronics components like Ball Grid Array (BGA) instead of many chip scale packages, which are potentially susceptible to failure while handling and shipping of the components. With the reduced mass of the component, accidental drop from the hand level would experience higher impact loading on the component to create significant damage.

Nomadic mobile consumer electronic (CE) devices are growing in functionality and popularity. Some of these devices, such as navigation systems, are being used in vehicles as a lower cost alternative to integrated vehicle options. Other devices, such as MP-3 players, are becoming the preferred source of music on the go. Wireless nomadic devices are now capable of accessing E-mail and other Internet-based functions. Automakers are beginning to recognize the importance of integrating support for such devices to facilitate their use in vehicles. A key element of this integration is the ability of the vehicle HMI to support both the operation of nomadic devices as well as the display of content from such devices. This paper presents an example of how a nomadic device can be properly integrated with the vehicle HMI using the AMI-C HMI architecture. In particular, a commercial nomadic device was used to stream MP3 content to a vehicle radio using an 802.11 wireless connection.

The FCC allocated the 5.9 GHz spectrum to enhance the safety and productivity of the nations transportation system. Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) is a medium range wireless communication protocol that supports vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-roadside, and roadside-to-vehicle communication. It enables both public safety and licensed private transactions. DSRC contrasts cellular and Wi-Fi by providing fast acquisition, low latency communication in a relatively close communication range. IEEE is developing the Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) communication standards to provide the groundwork for DSRC and enable seamless, interoperable services. The WAVE architecture includes IEEE P1609.1 (Application layer), IEEE P1609.2 (Security layer), IEEE P1609.3 (Network layer), IEEE P1609.4 (Upper MAC Layer), and IEEE 802.11p (Lower MAC and Physical layers).

Automotive radar application is a focus in active traffic safety research activities. And accurate lateral position estimation from the leading target vehicle through radar is of great interest. This paper presents a method based on the regression tree, which estimates the rear centroid of leading target vehicle with a long range FLR (Forward Looking Radar) of limited resolution with multiple radar detections distributed on the target vehicle. Hours of radar log data together with reference value of leading vehicle's lateral offset are utilized both as training data and test data as well. A ten-fold cross validation is applied to evaluate the performance of the generated regression trees together with fused decision forest for each percentage of the training data.

Audio playbacks are mechanisms which read data from a storage medium and produce commands and signals which an audio system turns into music. Playbacks are constantly changed to meet market demands, requiring that the control software be updated quickly and efficiently. This paper reviews a 12 month project using the MATLAB/Simulink/Stateflow environment for model-based development, system simulation, autocode generation, and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) verification for playbacks which read music CDs or MP3 disks. Our team began with a “clean slate” approach to playback architecture, and demonstrated working units running production-ready code. This modular, layered architecture enables rapid development and verification of new playback mechanisms, thereby reducing the time needed to evaluate playback mechanisms and integrate into a complete infotainment system.

The technological and process developments within the semiconductor industry during the past two decades has led to significant advancements in the complexity, functionality and performance of standard devices, such as microprocessors, digital signal processors, memories and custom Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) suppliers have taken advantage of these developments to offer device configurations that can include millions of programmable gates integrated with megabytes of internal memory and processor cores in package profiles and temperature ranges suitable for a variety of applications. The combination of reusable intellectual property, low unit costs and relative ease of implementation has led to increased FPGA usage in the automotive industry. Engineers are turning to FPGA solutions to enable the required features and functions not currently available with standard components.

The evolution of car radio in the past seven decades is a perfect illustration of the convergence of diverse technical fields: RF electronics, mobile wireless communications, the Internet, personal computers, consumer electronics, and automotive human machine interfaces. The early part of the radio evolution was driven by the need to improve the received audio signal quality while in the past two decades the driver has been to increase the channel capacity and to enhance the degree of personalization. Besides traditional AM/FM programming, today's radios also play a variety of media such as cassette tape, CD, MP3, DVD-A etc. as well as over 100 channels of satellite digital audio programs. Going forward, we believe that the radio will continue to be the entertainment center of the vehicle, and that the consumers are expecting to have access to personalized information anywhere and anytime.

Entertainment is THE killer application of consumer electronics in vehicles. Ever since the first AM vacuum tube radio was factory installed in a luxury vehicle in the early 1930s, entertainment has led the introduction of consumer electronics (CE) in the transportation industry. For example, over the last 68 years the auto industry has adopted FM reception; transistor radios; electronic tuning; cassette and CD playbacks; and multi-speaker, multi-channel-amplifier premium audio systems. During the “technology bubble” period (1998-2001), many industry experts predicted the next CE “killer app” in vehicles to be mobile Internet. Although mobile Internet is still a dream, significant new entertainment applications such as rear seat DVD video, satellite digital audio broadcast (XM & Sirius), and MP3 radio have exploded in the automotive and commercial vehicle markets.