By Nicole DiGiose, content editor
The automotive infotainment trend makes sense, as there are plenty of uses for it. But infotainment units do more than handle navigation duties and passenger safety; they can also give the vehicle’s occupants information about the health and status of their car. For example, if your tires are low or one of your sensors aren’t working properly, your dashboard will tell you.
Infotainment units do more than handle navigation duties and passenger safety. Image source: Pixabay.
When it comes to the safety of powering vehicles, James Colby, manager of business and technology development for the electronics business of Littelfuse, believes technologies such as silicon carbide are going to be very important to the health of the vehicle.
“As you look at these higher voltage battery packs, they're going to need safety products like fuses that will ensure that nothing can happen to the pack catastrophically if there is some kind of a failure, an accident being the most relevant form of accident,” Colby said. “These fuses have to be able to disconnect that extremely high power, high energy source, and make sure that there are no thermal events.”
Fuses that are able to disconnect the battery in the event of an accident, an overload, or short circuit are critical. Littelfuse is growing and developing such high-voltage fuses that will ultimately be handling extremely high amounts of energy that will also be able to break that energy in the event of an accident.
When it comes to the overall safety of a connected car, Colby said the most prevalent threat that's going to exist during its lifetime is ESD, or static electricity. And surprisingly, it’s often generated by the driver, passengers, or technicians, as they get in and out of the car.
“You can picture Chicago or anywhere in winter where it's very, very dry,” said Colby. “As people slide in and out of cars, they're generating a high level of static electricity. If that’s accidentally discharged into any of the open ports, like on many of the cars today, which have a USB port or an AUX port, or the audio port on the front panel, if you accidentally touch that first and you discharge ESD into that socket, you could cause irreparable damage to that circuit,” he said. One way to lessen that threat or to eliminate it would be with the use of board level, PCB-mounted, ESD protection devices. Of course, the selection of those depends on the nature of the circuit itself.
The physical body of any car is important to its functionality, but when we think about connected vehicles, we also come across the issue of hacking. A car equipped with infotainment systems adjusted to your liking and storing private data is personal, and with connected cars becoming more autonomous, cybersecurity is a concern for automakers.
It should go without saying that cars represent a different type of security challenge from mobile phones, laptops, and servers, in which corruption or data theft is the hacker’s objective. Since using machine learning and AI (artificial intelligence) to spot malware after hackers infiltrate a car is too late, the approach must be to prevent an attack when hackers are attempting their crime. But given the skill of some cyber criminals, it’s not likely that one or few approaches can block their entry to a vehicle’s electronic make-up if they’re really looking to swipe specific information.
Of course, putting safety ahead of cost and keeping your car’s software up to date are two ways to keep a vehicle’s defense systems alert.
A look up the road
The infotainment systems of today are becoming much more important, and have more features than just a simple display. Between center stacks, instrument clusters, and heads-up displays, the driver’s and passengers’ health, along with the condition of the vehicle, will be monitored, and if anything needs attention, the vehicle will immediately alert the driver.
“Infotainment systems are going to be part of the car’s central system, like how a set top box in a house has become a gateway in the house,” Colby said. “You're going to have pretty much everything being driven off of that.”
Some examples would be having control of the rear displays for showing movies and content to passengers in the back seats. Ultimately, infotainment systems will be driving the navigation system, and the telematic systems will run off of it, too, as many circuits and systems originate in the infotainment system.
One unique challenge when it comes to these trusty intelligent systems making their way into automobiles across the globe is that they’re not suitable for fleets, which are groups of vehicles owned or leased by a business or other organization. Randy Field, Chief IoT Architect at James Breh, & Associates sees this as limiting.
“Infotainment systems aren’t suitable for fleets,” Field said. “You have Apple CarPlay, but it’s offered by Ford, and GM has OnStar. Chrysler has Uconnect. With a fleet, you’ve got pickup trucks from Ford, passenger vehicles from Chevy, and vans from Chrysler. You can’t deploy multiple platforms across your vehicles, so it’s a limitation of infotainment.”
For the industry to reach critical mass, it’s going to take sharing and standards on how information is delivered. In other words, the same services would have to be compatible across multiple platforms. Because of the challenges and competition here, Field sees another route.
“At some point in time, the automotive infotainment industry will become a plug-in device, whether it be your phone or tablet, or a whole module,” Field said. He also sees 5G being helpful to evolving infotainment systems, since companies can use it to download information quickly, and because 5G works across mobility and Broadband.
But automotive infotainment won’t just be targeting personal vehicles, because it will evolve depending on the use case.
“For autonomous taxis, the interior of a car will mimic the living room of someone’s home, with displays, connectivity, and lifestyle options for each of the passengers,” said Kent Robinett, vice president of business management of the automotive business unit at Maxim Integrated. “For more traditional cars, the mainstream integration of personal devices will continue, and Maxim will be a leading supplier of ICs to continue this adoption.”
No doubt about it, automotive infotainment is near-magical compared to vehicles made just 10 years ago. With buttons and nobs disappearing and cameras and displays of all sorts taking over, will cars in the not-so-distant future even have steering wheels? Will augmented reality (AR) take over parts of car windows? And, with a car that has your routine memorized and knows how to adjust your seat while also knowing what temperature to set your car to, will you ever have to remind it? And if you have to, all you’ll need to do is ask it, by the looks of it. If you’re really lucky, perhaps there will be a coffee maker built into your car, too.
With endless comfort wrapped in topnotch security, the automotive industry is driving into the future, and it’s driving fast.
Read the full EV Special Report.
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