Sensors

This month’s top scorers with five stars are the Audi Q3, BMW 1 series, Chevrolet Captiva, Fiat Freemont, Ford Ranger, Hyundai Veloster, Mercedes M-Class, Opel/Vauxhall Astra and Opel/Vauxhall Zafira Tourer, Lancia Thema and Toyota Yaris. The Lancia Voyager was awarded four stars.

The all-new global Ford Ranger is setting new standards in safety with a comprehensive suite of class-leading features, such as the Electronic Stability Program (ESP) and side curtain airbags.

The benefits of advanced driver assistance systems are fast becoming the focus of industry experts, globally. European Ministers have endorsed a target of reducing road fatalities to 50 percent of today’s levels by 2020. Euro NCAP is recognizing vehicle manufacturers for technologies that demonstrate a proven safety benefit. And, insurance companies are offering reduced rates for vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems.

New technology being developed by General Motors researchers could alert drivers of potentially dangerous driving situations in advance by using small, portable devices to create a wireless safety net.

Real-time control of safety-critical applications has been a longtime challenge for engineers. Application functions are becoming more complex and industry standards require more sophisticated functional safety concepts in both the automotive and industrial markets. Freescale has introduced its SafeAssure program to help system manufacturers more easily achieve compliance with the upcoming International Standards Organization (ISO) 26262 and exis...

Ford has demonstrated its latest advanced vehicle communication technologies at the simTD (Safe Intelligent Mobility – Testfield Germany) field operational test near Frankfurt, the first large-scale testing operation of car-to-car and car-to infrastructure communication on German roads.

Following the successful market launch of the SHT2x family of humidity and temperature sensors, Sensirion is now launching a sensor designed exclusively for temperature measurement. The new STS21 temperature sensor is based on the same chip as the SHT2x family and is housed in a tiny DFN package measuring only 3x3 mm. This makes the sensor ideal for use in applications where only very limited space is available.

Texas Instruments Incorporated today introduced a fully integrated, programmable solution for driving ultrasonic transducers in automotive park distance, blind-spot detection or similar object detection applications. With its highly configurable burst generator, low-noise amplifier and 12-bit successive-approximation-register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC), the PGA450-Q1 provides for processing the echo signals and calculating the distan...

Broadcom Corporation, Freescale Semiconductor and OmniVision Technologies, Inc today announced a jointly developed 360-degree surround view parking assistance system — the world's first Ethernet-based parking assistance solution.

STMicroelectronics today announced that the two companies are co-developing the next generation of their System-on-Chip processor for the vision-based driver-assistance segment of the automotive market.