Maxim Highlights Automotive Solutions at CES
January 2016 – One of the major trends at CES 2016 was the smart car and the connected car. This year’s show featured not on the vehicles but the vendors from the supply chain in the ecosystem. One of the primary suppliers in that chain is Maxim Integrated. They were showing three major pieces of their solution at the event. The premise of the solution is that the processing of the data is done in the digital domain, however data and sensor collection and information transfer inside the vehicle is still in the analog signal domain.
One of the leaders in the new compute oriented vehicles is NVIDIA with their GPU based dashboard and central computing modules. Maxim has collaborated with NVIDIA to enable the front end analog blocks for infotainment and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for NVIDIA’s DRIVE CX (cockpit) and PX (piloted driving) platforms in automobiles.
On the power management side, Maxim created a software-compatible, low-quiescent-current automotive-grade function for the NVIDIA visual computing module (VCM). This power solution meets the performance needs of the DRIVE CX and PX platforms. The NVIDIA VCM modular platform gives automakers a fast and easy way to integrate the most recent automotive-grade Tegra® processors in vehicles. The Maxim solution handles the interface on system power in the multiple operating modes of the vehicle.
Maxim created a gigabit multimedia serial link (GMSL) solution for in-vehicle high-speed data transfer between ADAS camera inputs and the NVIDIA SoC. The chip supports an optional link via an add-in card from the head unit of an infotainment platform to the display.
Finally they were demonstrating the MAX9286. This is a quad-channel 1.5Gbps deserializer from the GMSL product line. The design is the first in the automotive space that is able to synchronizing video streams from four cameras while simultaneously powering each camera over the same coax cable. These “aggregator” and “power-over-coax” features are utilized on the NVIDIA DRIVE PX to simplify design for ADAS systems with up to 12 simultaneous camera inputs per vehicle.
