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  Date: 07/06/2015

The road to self driving cars drives ADAS market for a robust growth

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) is becoming an important growth opportunity for electronics and semiconductor companies such as STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Fujitsu, Renesas Freescale and such broad product range expertise chip companies.

The most important factor driving advanced driver assistance systems is safety and security when a person is driving, so that driving becomes stressfree, which is becoming a priority in these days. Finally it leads to driverless cars, it looks more like transition to self driving concept than a sudden switchover, but most probably a rapid transition, depending on the market strategies, customers acceptance and regulatory approvals. Basically the system which need to take care of safety need to be even more robust in terms of quality and reliability. Some of the leading and older semiconductor companies have proven that their products are more reliable when it comes to extreme usage and also long-lasting. That makes them more eligible to supply semiconductor ICs and software for safety critical applications.

Though there are plenty of start-up semiconductor companies most of them are fabless, there is no proven track record of these companies having supplied such highly reliable components markets such as aerospace and defence. Whereas some of the semiconductor companies listed above have that experience of supplying to aerospace/defence or such similar high-rel applications where reliability is the most important factor.

To give you some of the market and new product information on the ADAS market, below we share you the latest happenings in the year 2015:

Market: A research report published in the marketsandmarkets.com has forecasted driver assistance systems shipment of 108.6 million units by 2018. The acceptance and adoption of technologies is more seen in Europe and America and followed by Asia-Pacific.

Technology:
Natural user interface such as voice commands and hand gestures is been already used and also further researched for failproof operation. The artificial vision technology is already used for pedestrian collision warning, Lane departure, forward collision warning, and many such vision-based actions.

Some other driver assistance systems applications include, adaptive cruise control, automated parking, advanced emergency braking system, and electronic stability control.

To start with most of the features in ADAS are getting integrated with in vehicle infotainment systems (IVI). Surround view, pedestrian and lane detection are some of the most common features getting integrated into IVI.

ADAS Systems today provide display of conditions inside and outside the vehicle, so that driver can take well-informed decisions and also alerted, and in some cases acted.

When it comes to processors used in automotive systems, no single vendor has any market domination. Both x86 as well as ARM advanced processor cores are used in most of the chips for processing sensor and imaging data inside driver assistance systems as well as infotainment systems. There are also new start-ups in this area, a company called Mobileye supplies processor family called EyeQ and also computer vision algorithms for advanced driver assistance systems, it has recently partnered with another company called Valeo which is developing ultrasonic sensors, radar, cameras for driver assistance systems. EyeQ4 is a system on chip for ADAS systems market. The EyeQ4 feature four CPU cores with four hardware threads and with six cores of Mobileye’s innovative and Vector Microcode Processors (VMP).

Sensor are the most critical component in ADAS, it can be optical camera or mems, radar lidar, ultrasonic, infrared and many such sensors.

Due to changes in design standards and requirements, the scalability of the hardware as well as software platform is very important in automotive Information Systems as well as driver assistance systems.

In automotive software platforms, though there's a push for open source software, OEM companies are still using proprietary software such as QNX, so that safety is ensured.

ISO 26262 is the biggest standard drive, more or less the complete industry has accepted it.

Artificial intelligence integrated car is like robot whose parts are distributed all around your car and is driving your car. This trend clearly tells auto-convertibles/transformers are more of a reality.
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N
Header ad Author: Srinivasa Reddy N
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