The automotive electronics industry is poised to take off, boosted by consumer demand, availability of new technology and new work done toward standardizing components. Electronics.ca Publications, a market research firm, predicts that the global car electronics market will grow from last year's $74 billion to $110 billion in 2011.

Another market researcher, BCC Research, estimates that the more-than-$16 billion worldwide automotive IC business in 2004 will rise at an average annual growth rate (AAGR) of 9 percent through 2009 to nearly $25 billion. In a report, the firm sees MOS micro ICs and MOS memory as the two largest product segments and expects 63 percent of all IC dollars to be spent in these two categories in 2009. BCC's analyst B.L. Gupta predicts that ICs will show the highest use growth trend in safety (10.4 percent), followed by body and chassis, each with AAGRs of 9.8 percent.

In India, at least 11 companies in the automotive components sector have invested overseas according to data from the Automotive Component Manufacturers Association. A report by the organization states that China produced about 2.3 million passenger cars and a little over 541,000 heavy vehicles in 2004-2005, with production growing at the fast CAGR of 15 percent and 11 percent. India, on the other hand, produced close to half that number of passenger cars growing at twice China's rate and about a third of the heavy vehicles, with production growing at nearly thrice the CAGR of China.

Consumer demand for fuel economy, concerns over the environment and driving safety are requiring car makers to make their vehicles more intelligent than ever before. According to the BCC report, automotive safety is a growing and stable market for ICs because of favorable pressures from all sides—governments, consumers and carmakers.

To that end, future car technologies are expected to deliver automated crash notification, lane-departure warning and vehicle-stability systems, and even autonomous driving. The electronic "intelligence" in cars is enabled by an increasing number of sensors. These transducers sense tire pressure, pressure against closing windows, rain, cabin temperature and humidity, positions of various valves, acceleration, proximity of vehicles to objects on the road or in the parking lot—the list goes on.

R. Colin Johnson writes in this issue that the design of closed-loop systems is helping engineers place stringent demands on precision from electronics. Since closed-loop systems keep calibrating themselves using feedback loops, they give better accuracy for cheaper components.

But vehicle-wide closed-loop systems mean that the amount of communication within each system as well as between systems will increase. Given the nature of the application, which often demands real-time response, the CAN bus will be eventually replaced by FlexRay.

FlexRay is the long-awaited communication protocol that zips data at a rate of 10Mbps with increased flexibility for system extension and dynamic use of bandwidth. The 10Mbps data rate is available on two channels, thus giving the system 20Mbps at full throttle.

An important recent development is that the FlexRay v2.1 protocol and PHY-layer conformance tests were released in February 2007. The tests complete the FlexRay v2.1 spec that was published in December 2005. This means that vendors can now have their silicon checked and qualified by conformance test partners.

New design techniques—including closed-loop design—increasing system complexity, the growing number of sensors and the new FlexRay communication standard together represent both a challenge and an opportunity, particularly for the rapidly expanding car industries in India and China.

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