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September 2015 • The PCB Magazine 19 The next chapter is V2V communication, which will be a cornerstone of ADAS. New an- tenna designs and lower loss materials will be required for these increasingly high data rates. These subsystems are a stepping-stone for driv- erless vehicles. Although Google cars, a fre- quent sight near Google's Mountain View, CA, headquarters are the most well-known, nearly every major auto manufacturer and Tier 1 sup- plier has a driverless vehicle project underway. Companies like Cadillac, Audi, Ford, Continen- tal, Bosch, and Delphi lead the pursuit. Lon- don's Heathrow Airport even has its own POD parking spaces where a driverless vehicle trans- ports you from the parking lot to your terminal. In May, Daimler's self-driving semi-truck was licensed to drive on roadways for testing, and in Australia, mining conglomerate Rio Tinto has self-driving trucks operating at three of its sites. Recently an Uber/Carnegie Mellon project for self-driving cars was spotted on the roads in Pittsburgh. There is a great deal of development fund- ing going into driverless car prototypes. How- ever, the key to driverless transportation is get- ting all the systems in the vehicle communi- cating with each other and with other vehicles on the road. The payback for these efforts? A study conducted by Texas A&M estimates that 90% penetration of self-driving cars in America would double road capacity and cut delays by 60% on major freeways. As a result of the confluence of these game- changing electronic features, there is a grow- ing collaboration between Silicon Valley and Detroit. Companies like VW and Ford are put- ting R&D centers in Silicon Valley, and there are plentiful rumors about Apple hiring auto industry executives. Tesla is one of the few auto makers to make PCB design a core competency, and maintains a top level PCB design team in house. This suggests the industry is headed for some significant change and that the trend of electronics growth in automotive will continue. One area where Detroit and Silicon Valley will likely be at odds is the NHTSA requirement that "automakers must continue to support and supply OEM parts and therefore software for a minimum of 10 years after the model year launch," points out Stacy Duff, president of PAPCO automotive, a major distributor of OEM repair parts in the Silicon Valley Area. Although Ford has been tight-lipped on the reasons for its departure from Microsoft and its alliance with RIM's QNX platform for its Sync 3 Infotainment system, the industry speculates that they came to an impasse over the NHTSA requirements for supporting hardware and software for over a de- cade, something very uncommon in the con- sumer electronics industry. Plus, this level of software and automation opens up major security concerns that will re- quire immediate and aggressive solutions. The publicity surrounding the hacking of the Jeep Cherokee in July will drive the industry to get even more serious about cyber security. Egil Ju- liussen, senior analyst at IHS Automotive, points out that, "Five years ago, the auto industry did not consider cyber-security as a near term prob- lem…this event shows that cyber-security pro- tection is needed even sooner than previously planned." So, no matter which area of automotive elec- tronics we are looking at, it seems certain the relentless pace of growth will continue. Based on the number of players looking at self-driving vehicles, we can expect significant milestones in that quest in the near future. All of this au- tomation will naturally create opportunity for reliability and cyber security experts, and all of it will use PCBs. So, if your shop is equipped to participate in this space, there may be some good business opportunity on the horizon. If all of this sounds like a science fiction novel from the 1950s, just consider that the dominant form of human transportation for the past 3,000 years was the horse, and it has only taken 100 years for that to change forever. All of a sudden, it isn't so fantastic to imagine sitting in a driverless car and catching up on e-mails or watching the news during your com- mute. PCB Jason Marsh is vice president of product management at insulectro. FEAturE DETROIT VS. SILICON VALLEy continues