Show report: Ethernet Technology Day in Detroit

By videantis GmbH

October 29, 2014

This was the first year that the show was held in Detroit, at the COBO center. In previous years, this event took place in the automotive capital of Europe, Germany. Attendance seemed down a bit compared to last year in Stuttgart, but that doesn’t mean the technology adoption is slowing down. On the contrary. Ethernet is coming to all cars, that’s clear. Last year, the first production car with Ethernet AVB was announced: the BMW X5. Now, besides at BMW, there are now many more models with Ethernet inside in production, including at Volvo and Mercedes. Using Ethernet in the car has many advantages, including lower cabling cost, and ease of integration. More and more companies are addressing this opportunity and were showing their Ethernet-based PHYs, switches and image sensing solutions.

Videantis showed a variety of video coding and computer vision applications, all running on the same multicore, extremely low-power, high-performance v-MP4000HDX silicon. Since videantis licenses its processor, similar to ARM, our product can be integrated into an SOC for automotive cameras, as a companion SOC to the head-unit, or inside the main applications processor. Low power is especially key for integration into cameras. Power consumption translates into heat, and these cameras are weatherproof and closed, making it hard to dissipate heat. Any extra heat will result in the image sensor generating more noise. Besides lowering power consumption, integration of our architecture into the camera has another advantage: the video analytics algorithms can run on the raw, uncompressed images, before they’re encoded and transmitted. As a result, the ADAS algorithms don’t suffer from the artifacts introduced during compression and instead retain their accuracy.

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