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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Thursday, August 27, 2009

1million nodes of FlexRay

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An announcement from NXP today tells us that the company has shipped one million FlexRay transceivers to the automotive industry; NXP sold the part first into the 2007-model BMW X5, and depending on options, if you order a series-7 BMW, you will apparently be getting “up to” 11 FlexRay transceivers. FlexRay, you may recall if you don’t have day-to-day involvement in the automotive design area, is a deterministic network used for real-time, fault-tolerant data transmission in power train and other safety-critical aspects – X-by-wire, in general – of vehicle control.
Depending how you look at it, it either took a very long time to reach this level of product uptake, or a remarkably short time. Long - in terms of the years that have elapsed since the original work on time-triggered protocols that fed into the definition of FlexRay; short – if you reflect on the lead times that used to prevail in getting any radically new technology into production vehicles.
I’d be embarrassed to tell you how long it is since I first sat through a presentation about how cars were going to have bus-based wiring. Back then, the primary motivation was to cut down the power loom bulk and weight; the vision was of a single power rail running round the car with serial-bus-connected ECUs telling individual functions to switch on or off, drawing power from the common bus-bar.
No-one – or no-one that got listened to, at any rate – envisaged the amount of data traffic that would circulate in an early-21st-century car, or that we would need multiple bus structures to handle it all. Curiously, the power wiring in today’s cars still retains much of the point-to-point aspect that the concept of…. No, you can guess the decade for yourselves…. aimed to eliminate. It may be based on multiple local power-distribution nodes for all the body functions and services, but the idea of a single power bus never did come about.
Meantime, here's details on NXP’s recently released TJA1081 and TJA1082, that complementing the earlier TJA1080A product.
Aslo, if you feel the need for an update on your FlexRay knowledge, TTTech Automotive has a training course running in Frankfurt on 13tha and 14th October 2009, with the following content, quote;
“This intensive course focuses on the concepts and mechanisms of FlexRay. Main objective of the training is to understand design requirements and the impact of the FlexRay communication protocol on the network design of an embedded system. Furthermore participants get to know how FlexRay can be used for deterministic, hard real-time systems.” Info and registration here.

Related entries in: Communications | High-Speed Design | Components/ Interconnect |

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