ANALOG DEVICES TO DEMONSTRATE AUTOMOTIVE SIGNAL PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY AT CONVERGENCE 2008

ANALOG DEVICES TO DEMONSTRATE AUTOMOTIVE SIGNAL PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY AT CONVERGENCE 2008

ADI’s automotive safety system, infotainment, and body/chassis electronics solutions target consumer demand for more efficient, higher-performance vehicles.

Norwood, MA (10/15/2008) – Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI), a global leader in high-performance semiconductors for signal processing applications, will highlight its automotive products and technologies during the Convergence 2008 Transportation Electronics Conference, which will be held Oct. 20–22 at the Cobo Center in Detroit. As a valued technology partner to the automotive industry, Analog Devices applies more than 40 years of signal processing experience to solve auto makers’ toughest design challenges, whether that means enabling drivers and passengers to experience living room quality audio and video in their cars, providing reliable motion sensing for airbag deployment and rollover protection, or designing highly precise signal monitoring and control solutions.

In keeping with the theme of Convergence 2008, “Vehicle Electronics Converging on Real Customer Needs,” ADI will demonstrate a series of innovative solutions showcasing car safety, infotainment and sensing electronics. For more information, visit http://www.analog.com/auto.

Automotive Safety Restraint: Although most of today’s safety systems are passive, OEMs are moving toward adaptive passive systems. This demonstration features an adaptive safety restraint system reference design developed by Infineon Technologies AG and based on ADI’s iMEMS inertial sensors. Tier 1 safety system suppliers and OEMs can now access a turnkey system solution where all the component interoperability risk has been removed, saving cost and development time.

Vehicle Stability Control: Analog Devices’ stability control demonstration incorporates ADI’s iMEMS Motion Signal Processing technology to illustrate the application of motion sensing in rollover detection and electronic stability control systems. The demonstration incorporates MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes to measure rotational movement in the X, Y and Z axes, and then illustrates pitch, roll, and yaw movement using desktop computer animation.

Multimedia Connectivity: Consumers are demanding compressed audio content that they can listen to while driving and that doesn’t require modifications to factory-installed radios and speaker systems. Car manufacturers are reacting to this trend by adding multimedia connectivity to current and next-generation radios. Analog Devices’ MDI (Multimedia Device Interface) demonstration is a hardware/software solution that allows car OEMs to quickly add compressed audio playback (MP3/WMA) to their audio systems without a lengthy radio redesign. The MDI solution supports various media, including USB sticks and SD cards. Audio streaming from a Bluetooth-enabled cellular phone is also supported. Additionally, the MDI software system contains all required components including device drivers, MP3/WMA audio decoders, CAN protocol stack, and a system framework that enables quick additions of application layer software by the car manufacturer

Automotive Audio Solutions: Today’s automotive head units are tasked with the centralized management of many different forms of content coming from CD changers, MP3 players, satellite radios, navigation systems, DVD players, USB hard drives and other storage media. The result is a series of digital input signals coming from many different asynchronous sources and operating at different samples. For this demonstration, ADI’s SigmaDSP audio processors manage these disparate signals through a unique combination of a DSP core, S/PDIF transceiver, and as many as eight stereo asynchronous sample rate converters. By providing the right level of performance, system integration and an efficient instruction set, the SigmaDSP product family is part of a highly-flexible audio routing matrix that simplifies automotive audio system design by enabling easy routing and processing of digital signals from many different sources.

Automotive Fluid Level Sensing: Automotive fluid level sensor operating environments are demanding, causing durability issues with existing mechanical solutions and driving demand for more robust, higher precision, cost competitive non-contacting sensing solutions. This demonstration illustrates how ADI’s capacitance and ultrasonic technologies can be adopted for fluid level sensing. ADI’s capacitance technology delivers a complete signal processing solution for level sensing, incorporating electromagnetic compatibility, adaptive environmental calibration, small package, low power consumption and fast response time. In addition, ADI’s innovative correlator-based single chip ultrasonic pattern detection technology adds a new dimension to the performance of ultrasonic sensing, enabling its implementation in mainstream automotive applications such as oil level sensing. Compared with conventional approaches, the correlator-based technology is independent of amplitude, offers a superior SNR and can transmit more power using longer patterns without resolution losses. This results in a higher precision, more robust, lower power, cost competitive solution.

HEV Battery Monitoring: The safe and reliable operation of a Li-ion-based battery stack requires that each cell voltage be accurately monitored and balanced as needs dictate. In addition, other parameters such as cell temperatures and stack current are required by the battery management unit. This demonstration, which highlights the comprehensive functionality of ADI’s AD7280 Li-ion battery monitor, also features the AD8210 current sense amplifier to measure stack current, and ADI’s iCoupler technology, which is used to isolate the high voltages of the stack from the low voltage electronics that follow.