Broadcom, Freescale, Omnivision bring Ethernet to parking assistance system

In an environment where an increasing amount of data needs to be processed, automotive data bus systems such as FlexRay and even MOST are hitting their limits. High-speed point-to-point connections are not flexible enough for many applications. Despite its non-deterministic nature, Ethernet is becoming the technology of choice for some automotive applications.

In a surround-view parking assistance system, the data streams from multiple high-resolution camera systems have to be transported to a processing unit. Now Broadcom Corp., Freescale Semiconductor and OmniVision Technologies have jointly developed such a 360-degree parking assistance system that utilizes Ethernet - for the first time in the industry, the companies point out.

The collaboration is an important step in the migration from a closed application to an open and scalable Ethernet-based driver assistance network to which several systems have access, the trio states. The cost advantages offered by Ethernet technology, combined with the high image resolution now available from affordable CMOS image sensors, dramatically expand the opportunity for OEMs to deploy 360-degree parking assistance camera systems across vehicle classes, bringing valuable assistance options to luxury and non-luxury markets alike.

The system is based on Broadcom's BroadR-Reach BCM89810 standalone physical layer transceiver (PHY), Freescales Qorivva MPC5604E 32-bit microcontroller (MCU), and OmniVision's AEC-Q100 qualified OV10630 color high dynamic range (HDR) system-on-a-chip (SoC) CMOS image sensor.

The OV10630's unique color HDR SoC structure with fully processed YUV output format enables a streamlined camera module architecture. Using this approach, the video signal can be fed directly into the Qorivva MPC5604E MJPEG encoding pipeline without the need for any additional processing ICs for RAW image to YUV format conversion, Freescale explained.

Industry analysts project significant growth for advanced driver assistance systems utilizing video data as input.

A demo system is now available. Visit http://www.freescale.com/automotive to learn more.

This article originally appeared on EE Times Europe.