During the life of the vehicle, its battery may need to be disconnected for maintenance work or to replace it if it has developed a fault. During reconnection it is possible to reverse the polarity of the battery connection, which can result in potential short-circuits and other problems with loads connected to the battery.
The 2-wire I²C bus is an incredibly useful way to add all kinds of low-speed I/O besides I²C while simplifying designs and trace routing.
Semiconductor devices are not perfect - all diodes and transistors are characterized by power losses due to switching and conduction. Switching losses occur during the interval between the on- and off-states of a junction, when there is both a voltage across the device terminals and a current flowing through it.
Designers know that redrivers are an essential part of solving signal integrity challenges in gigabit systems. But at speeds up to 8 GT/s in PCI Express 3.0 systems, linear redrivers are needed to also comply with PCI-SIG specs and with chipset vendors’ datasheets.
Everything is “smart” lately. But the brain added to your toaster needs some basic—yet elegant—peripheral controllers and sensors to be truly useful.
Move over CANbus, PCI Express is the latest communications technology found in automotive infotainment.
Capable of 10 Gbps speeds and beyond, DisplayPort requires linear redrivers to achieve proper signal integrity with link training.
The multiple power rails of today’s FPGAs and high-performance processors must be powered up and powered down in strict sequence. The decoupling capacitors normally attached to the power rails must be actively discharged, to ensure proper control of the power-down sequence and to complete power-down in an acceptable time. This article describes the principles and design of active discharge circuitry, and explains selection criteria for key components such as power MOSFETs to ensure repeatable performance and reliability.
Daylight running lamps for motor vehicles are now a legal requirement in Europe. They became mandatory for new cars manufactured from February 2011 and for commercial vehicles from August 2012. Although they now need to be incorporated in vehicles by law, the daylight running lamp provides a number of opportunities for car and van designers to improve multiple aspects of the driving experience and their own brand image.
While it’s been said many times before, the automotive electrical environment is tough! As demonstrated in figure 1, the nominal battery voltage of an automobile can vary from -12V DC, under reverse battery condition, to +125V DC due to load transients and inductive field decay. Factor in wide variations in operating temperature, numerous interconnections and an open environment that is subject to possible ESD damage from human interactions, and you have an operating environment that is far more challenging than, for example, that of the consumer market segment.
