FPGAs Hit the Road
Programmable Logic Drives Automotive Applications

When I first started driving, I was technically competent for a teenager. I had the use of an old car that I could drive for as long as I could keep it working. Do-it-yourself car repair was just one of the skills required to be mobile in my family. The components I needed to replace or repair were all still available even though the car was in its second decade. The skills and technical background required to diagnose and solve most of the problems that came up were well within the grasp of the average teenager. When the water-pump bearing/seal assembly expired, a quick trip to the parts store and a couple of hours leaning over the fender (mostly spent trying to find the perfect combination of socket wrenches to remove the six seemingly simple bolts) got me back on the road again.

I never counted, but I’m reasonably certain that the IC count in my car was zero. This wasn’t the Stone Age. I owned a PC and a programmable calculator at the time, but sophisticated semiconductors weren’t involved in any part of my automotive experience. Furthermore, I was confident that by the year 2004, I’d be buzzing around in my flying car or jetpack like everyone else, with internal combustion engines nowhere to be found. My teenage vision of the future was flawed. Instead of my car growing wings, my PC grew wheels. Where I was expecting a revolution in power-plant and drive-train technology, the revolution came in information technology instead.

Today, with the term “telematics” being used regularly by five times as many people as would be able to define it, everyone knows that the revolution is afoot. What no one has figured out is exactly where we’ll be when it’s over. The convergence of computing, wireless communications, control systems, signal processing, consumer, and industrial electronics is nowhere more apparent than in the vortex that is being created over the old-school-engineering-collides-with-21 st-century-technology quagmire of modern automotive design.

While much has been made of the fact that automotive development cycles have shrunk by a factor of two over the past decade or so, the resulting time from concept to deployment to end-of-life of an automobile design is still eons in the evolution of electronics standards. The opposing forces of time-to-market reduction, design flexibility, and obsolescence prevention have brought FPGA and programmable logic technologies into the spotlight as one of the most compelling solutions to design headaches.

While the impact of semiconductor technology was first felt in the area of engine and emissions control, recent developments have focused more in the areas of entertainment, safety, security, comfort, communications and information. In the past, automotive electronic design was somewhat of an island, working almost independently of other applications areas. Through the current explosion of globalization and convergence, however, the fortress walls of engineering isolation are coming down, and automotive engineers are faced with compatibility issues in every direction possible, from telecommunications and networking standards to GPS to the ever-shifting sands of entertainment media and formats. At a more detailed level, designers must deal with the copious cabling required to interconnect these complex systems and with the plethora of power-supplies needed for the wild mix of technologies involved. [more]