Dec 17 2015
AVX Corporation, a leading manufacturer of passive components and interconnect solutions, has teamed up with Mouser Electronics, celebrity engineer Grant Imahara, and several other visionaries within the global electronics industry to launch a Driverless Cars Series for Mouser's award-winning Empowering Innovation Together™ program, which is designed to inspire creative thinking in both professional and aspiring engineers.
Dedicated to addressing various aspects of autonomous vehicle technology spanning history, ethics, discoveries, innovations, and public opinion, the Driverless Cars Innovation Hub features articles, blogs, videos, challenges, product information, and other in-depth technical content contributed by various industry experts to provide visitors with insider insights about where technology is heading and how autonomous driving will revolutionize how we live and get around.
"Moving to full-scale autonomous driving will have substantial economic, environmental, and social impacts that will drastically change the way people live and conduct their everyday lives," said Mouser Electronics President and CEO, Glenn Smith. "This new series is a great opportunity for the engineering community to experience first-hand the technology created and still needed for driverless cars to become a reality."
In Autonomous Driving and Vehicle Gesture Recognition, one of the several Driverless Videos now available in the Driverless Cars Innovation Hub, AVX Fellow Ron Demcko and celebrity engineer Grant Imahara explore the future of the Human Machine Interface (HMI), how gesture recognition is changing the way we interact with vehicles, and the extremely advanced, fail-safe components that are helping driverless cars become a reality.
"AVX is one of the leading innovators in driverless and connected car technologies, so we're thrilled to be a part of Mouser's Driverless Cars Innovation Hub," said AVX Fellow, Ron Demcko. "AVX already offers several fail-safe film, niobium oxide, and film capacitors for critical circuits; we're expanding our current offerings with enhanced performance specifications, including higher frequencies; and many of our most talented engineers are actively developing a host of RF-grade, AEC-Q200 capacitors, inductors, and filters designed to enable the software, sensors, processing centers, and power circuits that are critical to the successful realization of autonomous vehicle technology."
Despite being operated by autonomous action, passive components are plentiful and vital to driverless technology. For example, sensors feed information to the software that ensures safe, effective drive performance, to the processing center where decisions like brake engagement and which camera to use are made, and to the power circuits that use sensor signals to turn the motor that performs the required autonomous action. Additionally, although automotive standards for components are already demanding to ensure public safety, the standards for autonomous vehicles are even more stringent, which is why fail-safe components — components capable of continuing to operate as passive components even if driven to failure — are essential to the successful realization of driverless technology.