Continental AG, which paid approximately $1 billion in April a year ago for Motorola‘s automotive electronics business, is now investing $15.6 billion (€11.4 billion) to acquire Siemens VDO Automotive AG. It‘s Continental‘s largest-ever purchase. With combined sales of $34.3 billion (€25 billion) and a work force of nearly 140,000, the firm will rank in the automotive electronics industry‘s top five. The deal is expected to be closed in Q4 and the firms integrated by the end of 2009. There‘s no word yet on workforce reduction or the effect of the merger on specific product lines.

STMicroelectronics and Freescale say that since announcing their joint design effort last year they‘ve accelerated automotive design activity in the areas of IP development, flash technology alignment and new product definition. They‘re applying Power Architecture technology for powertrain, chassis, motor control and body systems and they‘ve produced test chips in 90nm embedded flash technology.

Freescale VP Mike McCourt says the pair plan to deliver four new products early next year, and in the next couple of years they expect a “comprehensive roadmap” of scalable MCU designs. Mike reports that customers are interested in the MCU designs that are coming, as well as in the combined product and process capabilities and the dual-sourcing potential. The companies have set up four design centers employing a total of 130 design engineers.

ST VP Marco Maria Monti says that the common MCU architectural platform design facilitates the simultaneous design of multiple products with peripheral sets optimized for specific target applications, translating to faster time-to-market.

As Dr. Phil might ask, how is all of that working for you? Are you using Power Architecture technology and are you among the automotive customers anticipating delivery of samples in Q1? What‘s your take on the collaboration?

ST Microelectronics is offering 32Mb automotive-grade (-40 to 125°C) NOR Flash devices manufactured on a 0.11-micron process. They‘re promising 64Mb devices in Q2 and 128Mbit parts by the end of the year. The low end of the ST automotive-grade NOR Flash line is 4Mb. Competitor Spansion offers MirrorBit NOR products in densities from 16Mb to 1Gb.

ST‘s 32Mbit M29W30 targets dashboard systems and multimedia, among other automotive applications. The devices can be read, programmed and erased over a 2.7V to 3.6V power supply range. Asynchronous random access time is 70ns, and typical byte or word programming time is 10µs. Data retention is guaranteed at 20 years minimum, and write endurance is 100,000 program/erase cycles per block. The chip can be organized in 8-bit or 16-bit words. Other features include independent block erase, optional Fast Programming, and a 64-bit security code.

I‘m nearing the end of my cell phone contract, so I need to decide what to do. The options are to keep my perfectly good cell phone - the one with features I‘ve yet to master - or upgrade to a Bluetooth handset. The benefit of option A, of course, is a lower average cost per-month over the life of the phone. I‘d be leveraging my initial investment. Sounds smart. But then I wouldn‘t get to play with Bluetooth. Lower “cool” factor. I write about Bluetooth; might as well have it. Okay. Indulgence wins.

But wait. If I get a Bluetooth handset, I want to be able to use it in my car, so I‘ll need a hands-free car kit. Let‘s look online. A Bluetooth headset would probably work fine - presuming that I got one that would work with my new handset.

Having written about integrated Bluetooth systems, though, don‘t I really want one that will work through my car‘s audio system and mute the radio volume when someone calls me? Sure I do.

One review site recommends the Parrot CK3100, which is available from various professional installers. But is that the latest and greatest? Apparently not, according to the Parrot web site (www.parrot.biz/usa/products/pdf/carkits). There‘s the 3200 LS-Color; a couple of models that will work with my portable navigation device (CK3300 and 3400 LS-GPS), except that I don‘t have a portable navigation device yet, and they offer a system (RHYTHM N‘BLUE) that will fit into my instrument panel.

That brief amount of research prompts me to rethink my options. What‘s the primary value of Bluetooth for hands-free calling? It‘s safer. For now, I can use a wired headset, and resolve not to dial and drive at the same time.

Yeah, but what if I were to upgrade my handset and then upgrade my car? Why then…..

Like every other product development organization, BMW Group (www.bmwgroup.com) wants to squeeze excess time out of its process and lower its manufacturing costs. As part of that effort, it‘s decided to standardize on MSC Software‘s (www.mscsoftware.com) MD Nastran, which is multi-discipline (hence the MD) enterprise software for simulation and engineering analysis, including computational fluid dynamics/fluid structure interaction, strength and durability, shock and vibration, and thermal behavior (convection and conduction).

The software, which integrates MSC Nastran, Marc, Dytran and LS-Dyna, is intended to help BMW reduce the number of simulation tools it has to manage as well as to reduce its need for physical prototypes. MD Nastran shares a common data model among various environments - fluid, thermal, structural, etc. - so no time is lost in translation from one to the next. The tighter coupling of simulation environments should also reveal design flaws earlier.

Electronic stability control (ESC) may cost an OEM $300 or more per-vehicle, so how much should the OEM charge the customer for the feature? Nothing, says John Krafcik, vice president of product development and strategic planning at Hyundai Motor America. Hoping to seize the ESC high ground, Hyundai has decided to make the feature standard on models that account for about 70% of its sales in the ‘07 model year - upwards of 350,000 vehicles.

Citing research conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Krafcik noted that ESC can reduce the risk of fatal single-vehicle crashes by 56% and fatal multi-vehicle crashes by 32%. According to IIHS, as many as 10,000 fatal accidents could be avoided each year if all vehicles were equipped with ESC. Susan Ferguson, IIHS senior vice president for research, says the Institute‘s findings “indicate that ESC should be standard on all vehicles,” and adds, “Very few safety technologies show this kind of large effect in reducing crash deaths.” A researcher at the University of Michigan concurs, suggesting that ESC systems “appear to be the most significant safety advance since seat belts.”

Hyundai is by no means alone in making ESC a standard feature. According to the IIHS, ESC is standard on 40 percent of 2006 passenger vehicle models, including every vehicle from Audi, BMW, Infiniti, Mercedes, and Porsche; however, nine automakers make the technology available on no more than 25% of their models.

ESC technology is available from a handful of suppliers, and there‘s not much differentiation among them, according to Krafcik. OEMs must decide where to set the threshold, and whether or not to provide an ESC on/off switch (Hyundai will), or include a buzzer or warning light when the system activates (Hyundai won‘t). “The reason that ESC works so well is that it helps a driver do what the driver would do intuitively in an ESC situation,” Krafcik says.

Hyundai‘s decision to make ESC technology standard gives the company great economies of scale, according to Krafcik. “If we‘d made ESC an option, we‘d double our build complexity, yet few dealers would order it because few customers are likely to ask for it,” he says. With ESC a standard feature, however, suppliers can anticipate high volume and price accordingly. Krafcik adds that ESC gives Hyundai‘s design engineers more freedom, since they can achieve good limit handling performance without having to compromise for non-ESC models.

Krafcik says that with ESC as a standard feature on its midsize Sonata sedan, he can claim safety leadership positioning against its primary competitors - Toyota Camry and Honda Accord - and still undercut them in price. “Anyone can do what we‘re doing, but since they‘re not, we see (ESC) as an opportunity for us to lead.” It‘s an opportunity he thinks can only last another couple of years by which time stability control is likely to be standard on every vehicle.

The more we get, the more we want, at least in terms of sound quality and entertainment options, and on that premise, Texas Instruments has launched a new 8-channel audio DSP, TAS3108, in both auto and home flavors. It‘s currently in production, with the automotive version (TAS3108AIDCP) priced at $4.91 in 10k quantities.

TI sees a trend toward multi-channel sound in its auto audio business. “Multi-channel meant 5.1 until about a year ago; now it‘s 7.1,” says automotive audio marketing manager Ryan Reynolds. Besides more channels and higher output power per-channel, there‘s a need to accommodate more sources, such as satellite and HD radio, and various compressed audio formats, not to mention rear-seat entertainment. In short, OEMs see infotainment as an opportunity for differentiation, and that leads to the need for greater processing capability.

Packaged in a 4.4 x 9.7mm, 38-pin TSSOP, the TAS3108 is AECQ100-qualified and TS16949 certified, and it operates over the -40 to 105 °C temperature range. Based on a 135MHz, 48-bit fixed-point DSP core and 8051 MCU, the chip is rated at 675 MIPS. It can perform five simultaneous instructions per clock cycle and, with single-cycle, 76-bit (48×28) multiply-accumulate, is capable of 135 million multiple accumulates per-second (135 MMACS) performance.

Application development aids include both a a drag-and-drop graphical development environment (GDE) with pre-optimized components, and a text-based integrated development environment (IDE). Reynolds says the GDE lets customers program and control each component in real time, and to publish their own components, with proprietary algorithms.

SMSC became a major player in the market for MOST (Media Oriented Systems Transport) components in March 2005 when it acquired Oasis Silicon Systems. Since then it‘s sold MOST chips and licensed a number of firms to use its MediaLB interface technology for connecting to MOST networks.

Now it‘s come out with a MOST50 family of products said to operate on MOST networks at 50Mb/s versus 25Mb/s and to run on unshielded twisted pair (UTP) copper wires versus plastic optical fiber (POF).

MOST is popular among European automakers as an effective network protocol for infotainment applications but it hasn‘t gained much traction in the U.S., where cost is a primary concern. It‘s facing competition from IDB-1394 - automotive grade FireWire.

Most if not all MOST networks in Europe use plastic optical fiber (POF), but U.S. automotive design engineers wanted to see it available on UTP, so MOST Cooperation developed a copper wire spec (ePhy) that U.S. OEMs are currently testing.

SMSC says that until now, UTP performance topped out at 1Mb/s because of the radiation-sensitive environment of cars in production today. With ePHY, OEMs can achieve 50Mb/s while continuing to use existing electrical cables and connectors.

Chipmakers are becoming slightly more granular in the way they position their automotive microcontrollers. Freescale and Renesas, to name two, each offer MCUs specifically for telematics. How do you select the one that’s right for your application, and what compromises, if any, do you have to make? To judge from the firms’ respective descriptions, what’s most important is the breadth and depth of application development/debug support, and the optimum combination of peripherals on-chip or readily accessible.

Freescale’s 885 MIPS MPC5200B, introduced at Telematics Detroit last year, is pin- and software-compatible with the MPC5200. It‘s based on Freescale‘s mobileGT architecture/infrastructure (Wind River, QNX, and Green Hills Software, etc.), and supported by the Media5200 Development System, the Lite5200B evaluation board, and various third-party firms.

Application development aids include PowerTAP run control tools; the OSEKturbo operating system; CodeWarrior Development Studio mobileGT Edition; and a Linux Board Support Package (BSP) optimized for the mobileGT architecture and Media5200 development platform.

The Media5200 includes 128MB DDR SDRAM and 64MB flash; an integrated graphics system with an 8.4-inch color LCD; a multi-channel audio subsystem with an AC‘97 sound card; camera input; GPS; integrated CAN, J1850 and MOST networking support; two PCI and one mini-PCI connectors, and ATA, USB, Ethernet, S/PDIF and multiple serial connections.

Anand Ramamoorthy, general manager of Freescale‘s infotainment, multimedia and telematics business, says the MPC5200B‘s single (PowerPC) core is more efficient and less expensive than multi-core alternatives. The chip features a double precision floating point unit; a memory management unit-based architecture with DDR memory support; integrated PCI, ATA and USB buses; multiple serial channels; up to three I2S interfaces, and Ethernet support.

Because all applications execute on a single core, Ramamoorthy says that, for example, features like front-seat navigation can work in tandem with rear-seat entertainment. He adds that the MPC5200B can support audio compression decode/encode, as well as video decode.

Renesas is targeting cost-sensitive telematics applications with its 540 MIPS/2.1 GFLOPS SH7397 telematics chip, the “Euclid.” Based on a 300MHz SH-4A superscale core, the SH7397 is upward code-compatible with the 200MHz, SH-4-based SH7760 (“Camelot”). The new chip is at the high end of Renesas‘ “compact solutions” line. The firm also offers “scalable” and “highly integrated” solutions.

The SH-4A core has two separate 32-Kbyte, 4-way set-associative cache memories, one for instructions and the other for data. Paul Sykes, product marketing manager for telematics, says the combination boosts throughput by improving the cache hit rate. On-chip, fast-access 16-Kbyte RAM also speeds processing.

The SH7397 has a built-in floating point unit, a dedicated bus for connection to external high-speed DDR SDRAM, a color LCD controller capable of approximately 64,000 colors on an 800×600-pixel LCD panel, and a USB interface with a v1.1 host and a v2.0 function controller. The controller enables connections to mobile phones, portable music players, and other consumer devices.

Other peripherals include a 4-channel 10-bit A/D converter, real-time clock (RTC), 6-channel timer (TMU), interrupt controller, and 6-channel direct memory access controller (DMAC) for high-speed data transfers to and from memory.

The SH7397 has a serial sound interface and an audio CODEC interface for transmission/reception of voice and audio data in hands-free applications. Memory card interfaces support MultiMediaCard, SD memory card, PC card, and smart card for exchange and storage of multimedia and other data. The chip includes a CAN interface, and an Ethernet controller that can be used as a general-purpose LAN interface and as a link for software debugging. It also has a 3-channel serial communication interface with FIFO (SCIF), a 3-channel serial I/O with FIFO (SIOF), and a 2-channel I2C bus interface.

Renesas‘ “Sequoia” reference platform provides external memory; debug ports; peripheral functions for audio, display, and CAN; USB, PCMCIA, MMC, smart card, SD memory/IO card and Ethernet interfaces, and support for real-time operating systems (VxWorks, WindowsCE and embedded Linux) and middleware. QNX Software plans to add support for Sequoia to the QNX Neutrino RTOS.

What other devices work well for telematics applications?

ARM has rolled out a successor to its popular but aging ARM7TDMI processor core. CPU product manager Richard York describes the new Cortex-R4 as a midrange microprocessor that fills the gap between the M3 at the low end, and the high-performance A8 and ARM 1156. Those products all leverage the firm‘s 16/32-bit Thumb-2 instruction set, so ARM7 applications should work on the R4, only better, because the new chip is said to be four to five times faster than the ARM7 (200-250MHz versus 40-50MHz), and offer double the instruction execution efficiency. Size-wise, the new chip contains about triple the number of gates in the ARM7, but York figures that with advanced processes it shouldn‘t require much more silicon, and even if it did, the performance gain would justify the extra cost.

The efficiency gain comes from features like a vectored interrupt controller (VIC) port that saves clock cycles by doing in hardware what the ARM7 does in software. The VIC works in concert with a pre-fetch and branch prediction unit to keep the processor continually fed with data. The R4 can be configured with up to 64KB of instruction cache and 64Kb of data cache (versus 0KB of data cache in the ARM7).

The R4 also includes an OSEK-compliant memory protection unit; a tightly coupled memory (TCM) arbiter and interface for 2-cycle local memory access with ECC support; a 64-bit AMBA 3 AXI master interface, and a 64-bit AMBA 3 AXI slave interface, the latter including a DMA port. For developers, ARM‘s new microprocessor offers CoreSight debug and embedded trace macrocell (ETM) ports.

York obviously hopes that customers will use the R4 to take applications to the next level. He suggested, for example, that a customer using the ARM7 core in an ABS application might consider the R4 for ESP chassis control.

Texas Instruments, which uses the ARM7 in its TMS470 microcontroller family, is evaluating the R4 but has not yet committed to it. Competitors/customers Freescale (PowerPC), Renesas Technology (SH-4) and NEC Electronics America V850 were unavailable for comment.