Evaluation Engineering - 17

car's electronics to account for a seemingly endless amount of factors-whether they are for convenience or absolute
necessity for drivers and passengers.
This is alongside the need to keep today's
technology-heavy vehicles at an attractive price point.
"Automakers are facing the same challenges that other industries have to take
on, but escalated exponentially," said Sepp
de Maeyer and Daniel F. Wyatt, Western
Europe sales director and VP of Eastern
U.S. and Canada sales, respectively, for
Averna Technologies. "Cars offer a lifestyle, and they need to stay ahead of
the curve while remaining affordable.
Automakers juggle to keep components in
or on the vehicle current, flexible, and future proof, while delivering quickly. Speed
is key in such a competitive market. Both
of these factors make maintaining a budget very difficult, as they both contribute
to higher costs. Car manufacturers are
also more dependent on electronic device
manufacturers. This is a challenge that
won't disappear."
The Averna duo recently explained to
Evaluation Engineering that a trend they
are seeing increasingly more of is the effort to reduce the use of "development
mules" and moving testing into the lab
as much as possible with hardware-inthe-loop (HIL) simulation.
"Test mules cost OEMs millions of dollars and impose scheduling restraints
on the different groups needing to test
their products," Maeyer and Wyatt said.
"By being able to test in the lab, they can
test more effectively for a lot less money
while expediting the process. Averna's
AST-1000 is an excellent example of an
infotainment tester that can be done
100% in the lab, and with the record and
playback feature, it's possible to bring
real-world impairments back in from the
field for repeatability."
The transition from mechanical vehicle
to electromechanical vehicle will become
increasingly evident as automakers compete to outdo each other when it comes
to autonomous vehicles (AV). Widespread
fully autonomous vehicles may still be a
decade away, but until then, more and
more individual vehicle driving functions will become autonomous, and this

requires designers to innovate with several new-age technologies simultaneously.
"Another newer trend for automotive design is factoring in the necessities for complete connectivity," Maeyer
and Wyatt told EE. "We are seeing the
demands for the development of radar,
LiDAR, ADAS, and above all, autonomous driving. More and more cars are
now heading in that direction to remain
competitive, which is what makes camera assembly and installation so vital to
the field. With so much skepticism in the
technology, it needs to be executed flawlessly. Active alignment is playing a much
greater role than it has in the past."
To take a deep dive into the topic of
automotive test and design, EE gathered
commentary from more than a dozen vendors of automotive test solutions, asking
for their input on technology trends, challenges, demands, and what new products
are on the market. Read on to see what
they told us.

What's trending?
What key trends or new challenges have
you seen emerge in automotive design
and/or simulation over the past year?
Sandeep Sovani, global automotive industry director at ANSYS: "We can comfortably say we're in a great mobile evolution.
The automotive industry has existed for
about 125 years, and in just the next few
years, it's going to totally transform into
a mobile industry. Vehicles are becoming
electric, driven by batteries or fuel cells.
Along with those trends, the deeper underlying trends include functional safety
and the rise of electronics and software.
The amount of lines of code inside a car
are mind-bogglingly high compared to,
say, an aircraft."
Greg Kregoski, North America automotive
business development manager at Rohde
& Schwarz: "In order to increase the level
of autonomy in automotive driving, the
number and complexity of sensors in a
car have steadily increased. In the case of
the automotive radar, the physical placement of these sensors is critical to ensuring that the vehicle is getting an accurate
picture of the outside world. If the radar

transceiver is not mounted correctly, this
can impair the ability of the sensor to determine accurately a target's location."
Bob Stasonis, technical product specialist
at Pickering Interfaces: "The biggest trend
we see is 'more data.' Whether it is input
from cameras, sensors, strain gauges, or
LiDAR, or your child downloading the
latest video from the internet, more and
more data is handled within the confines of your vehicle. And as much of the
above data is critical to the safety of the
vehicle's occupants, the networks in the
vehicle must be reliable and function in
a real-time environment. So, testing of
a network's robustness can be as complex as testing all of the added protocols
for automobiles layered on the IEEE 802
Ethernet standard or simply testing the
path protection scheme by injecting faults
into one or more physical connections."

The ultra-small SLICE6 data acquisition system
from DTS is designed to be integrated into crash
test dummies for injury biomechanics testing.

Hans Hellsund, director of sales at
Diversified Technical Systems (DTS):
"Advancing passenger and pedestrian
safety has continued to be at the forefront of automotive design. One of the
main trends in automotive safety testing has been moving the data acquisition
systems (DAS) onboard the vehicle and
inside crash test dummies. Embedding
the data acquisition inside the vehicle and
anthropomorphic test devices eliminates
the bulky and heavy exit cables that can
affect positioning, target weights, and potentially alter free-flight test dynamics."
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Evaluation Engineering

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