ST @ ITS 2010: Silicon solutions for safer and smarter cars

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND: A top-three automotive semiconductor vendor, STMicroelectronics will demonstrate its latest innovations for car safety, navigation and infotainment at the 17th ITS World Congress held in Busan, Korea, on October 26-29, 2010.

ITS is the world's largest exhibition and conference on intelligent transport systems and services. ST supplies chips to all major automotive manufacturers and its portfolio of automotive solutions covers all key application areas in the car.

The company combines an unparalleled platform of advanced technologies with a thorough understanding of the automotive market that it has gained through close collaboration with leading customers and an unswerving commitment to quality.

ITS 2010 visitors are invited to Booth A-11-2-R, Hall 2A, BEXCO (Busan Exhibition Convention Center), where the demonstration of ST's innovative products is organized in three application zones:

Advanced safety
Developed in co-operation with MobilEye, ST's EyeQ2 processor is by far the most powerful processor dedicated to automotive vision, with multiple cores and seven dedicated vision-processing units enabling advanced driver-assist features. These features include collision-avoidance technologies, lane-departure warning systems and pedestrian protection.

ST and MobilEye are working with multiple leading tier-one suppliers developing machine vision for world-leading vehicle brands and the first production vehicles containing this technology have already hit the roads. The EyeQ2 has received a 2010 Car Safety Award from the BusinessCar magazine.

ST will also be showing its latest automotive CMOS camera module for vision-based ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems) that achieves the best sensitivity and dynamic range among devices currently on the market.

Other presentations in the Advanced Safety zone will include ST's solutions for radar-based ADAS, including 24/26GHz radar for short-range and side-mounted applications and 77GHz radar for long-range, forward-looking systems such as Active Cruise Control and autonomous braking.

Infotainment
In the infotainment zone, ST will demonstrate its state-of-the-art multi-standard digital radio receiver chipset (RF + baseband). This chipset is based upon a digital radio baseband IC that combines AM/FM phase diversity with dual DAB chains in a single chip. This is a cost-effective option to run in parallel and seamlessly switch between the legacy AM/FM and the terrestrial digital broadcasting (DAB+/DMB-A/DRM).

The HD Radio/Class D demo showcases the implementation of a full digital chain from the radio to the power amplifier. ST's HD Radio receiver supports all the latest features of this terrestrial digital radio technology, including the simultaneous reception of audio and data from two independent radio channels.

The power amplifier section provides an extremely efficient and environment-friendly digital class-D audio, compatible with the latest automotive technology trends including start-stop and hybrid traction.

Navigation and positioning
ST's Cartesio+ application processor with embedded GPS combines superior processing power and positioning accuracy with a rich set of integrated peripherals, enabling reliable and feature-rich multimedia car navigation systems. At the same time, the cutting-edge System-on-Chip device satisfies the most stringent automotive-quality constraints.

Another demo introduces the latest generation of ST's single-chip standalone positioning receiver, Teseo II, which is the industry's most flexible and cost-effective solution for portable and in-car telematic applications. Compatible with all major navigation standards, including GPS, GALILEO and GLONASS, ST's Teseo II delivers high positioning accuracy and indoor sensitivity performance.

Automotive semiconductor content overall is expected to grow by more than 10 percent every year through 2016, according to Strategy Analytics. Another market analyst, Gartner, breaks down its car chip forecast by subsystems, attributing more than 14 percent and 7 percent CAGR to the semiconductor content of safety systems and in-car multimedia entertainment, respectively, over the next five years. ST is well positioned to benefit from both of these projections.