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December 21, 2015

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Home » Business » Autotalk Special

Electronics to build next generation of smart cars

By Anna Lu | December 21, 2015, Monday | Print Edition

With the recent completion of its merger with US-based Freescale Semiconductor Inc, Holland’s NXP Semiconductors has become the biggest player in vehicle electronics in the world.

The Dutch company is looking at a potential 40 percent increase in business in that sector, and much of the synergy between the two companies is expected to play out in the area of smart connected cars.

Those are the cars, still at an experimental stage, that are engineered to drive automatically or semi-automatically, based on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) wireless communications.

Chips for the cars were mass-produced for the first time last year by NXP, and General Motors will carry them to the consumer market sometime next year.

Following this industrial trend closely, China now sees a strategic opportunity to upgrade its auto industry during the 13th Five-Year Plan period that starts next month.

NXP, as a partner in a pilot smart-connected car program coordinated by Tongji University in Shanghai, will test the localization of its technologies. At the onset of the partnership last month, Waidy Chan and Roger Gan, senior regional director and senior regional marketing manager of automotive business at NXP China, talked to Shanghai Daily about the new future of mobility.

Q: When we talk about localization, what is NXP facing here?

Chan: The most important part is to do road tests and go through mass data generated by it to improve our algorithms. Driving habits and road conditions vary from one country to another, so we need to fine-tune our scenario modeling. With the number of smart-connected cars in Shanghai’s experiment to go from just 200 now to 20,000 units in 2018, the learning curve will become less steep over time. The machines have deep learning abilities.

Q: Some of the functions that smart connected cars promise, such as collision warning, can already be achieved by traditional cars fully loaded and programmed with sensors. Could you comment on different autonomous driving, based on passive detection and active communications, technically and economically?

Chan: The ultimate stage of autonomous driving should see a combination of them both, which are complementary in terms of the distance range for application. For example, radars and cameras can help a car know its way around the surroundings, while V2X communications keep it informed about the traffic beyond sight and updated about the best predictable routes to destinations. It is hard at this stage to compare the costs because they are closely related to the scale of applications. All I can say is that the cost of V2X communications could take preference to other wireless communications.

Q: So when V2X comes of age, are all cars supposed to communicate on one single channel?

Chan and Gan: It is a question like: can we connect to the Internet through different brands of routers? The answer is yes. But there is currently no universal standard for V2X communications — a big obstacle for smart-connected cars to move forward. The US has already developed its own standard — 802.11p — whose application will start industrialization in 2017 and later become compulsory for carmakers in the country. China is still working on its own standard, involving the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Transport, and the Ministry of Public Security, all having their own agendas. We believe eventually the result will be aligned with international practices because China has learned in the past that being incompatible in the industry of communications risks being isolated.

Q: Is it necessary for China to develop its own standard?

Gan: I think China should have its own standard, fine-tuned at the application level according to its own driving habits and road conditions, but in the same physical layer as the standards for the US and Europe, which are very demanding in transmission delay and highly concerned about the safety issue. In China, when carmakers talk about smart-connected cars, they talk more about services, efficiency and convenience that can be achieved through 4G Internet connection. But for the V2X communications, there should be a separate, dedicated channel for data transmission, because it could be a life-and-death matter to owners of automated cars.

Autotalk Special


 

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