Delphi Automotive plc, a leading supplier of automotive components and subsystems, will be putting vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications systems into volume production using the Roadlink chipset from NXP Semiconductors NV.
This will enable cars to communicate with each other securely and with roadside traffic infrastructure. Delphi's product is expected to be the first on the market and on the roads within two years, NXP said.
The Roadlink chipsets that NXP (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) has been contracted to supply make use of the IEEE802.11p standard, an amendment to that used for Wi-Fi, to provide wireless access in vehicular environments. Messages are broadcast on the licensed band between 5.85GHz and 5.925GHz and can work between high-speed vehicles and between vehicles and the roadside infrastructure.
Delphi (Gillingham, Kent) is combining NXP chipsets with application software from Cohda Wireless Pty. Ltd. (Adelaide, Australia) that allows alerts to delivered to vehicles from other cars and surrounding infrastructure. The messaging could include collision warnings, road-condition hazards, presence of emergency vehicles, stationary or slow-moving vehicles and so on. While most of these messages could be directed at the driver some would be a complement to Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and radar capabilities.
The Roadlink chipset comprises the SAF100 software-defined radio baseband processor and the TEF510x dual-channel multi-band radio transceiver. They cover global requirements including U.S and Europe at 5.9GHz, the Japanese 760MHz C2X standard and Wi-Fi and DSRC operation at 5.8GHz. NXP also supplies hardware security modules (HSM) and verification acceleration software to protect the connected car against hacking or data theft.
It is conceivable that such messaging could be used to invoke automatic braking for collision avoidance and to save lives. However, there are clearly legal implications for the invocation of automatic swarm behavior that may avoid a collision in one location but fail to prevent one elsewhere.
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