Automotive technologies
Tap into imec’s expertise to speed up your development of components for tomorrow’s electric, connected or autonomous vehicles.
The automotive industry shaped the economic and urban landscape of the 20th century. Today, it needs to reinvent itself to rise to 21st century challenges, such as the decarbonization of our energy system and the creation of smart, connected cities.
This requires car manufacturers and their suppliers to venture into new territory. And integrate automotive nanotechnology and digital technologies to make their products greener, safer and more adapted to the sharing economy.
Imec is your trusted copilot for this ride into the unknown. Make us your partner for your R&D efforts. Or take advantage of our portfolio of networking and chip technologies.
Technologies for ADAS and beyond
When will we see the first autonomous cars on our roads? Nobody in the automotive industry can say for sure. But progress is continuously being made through the implementation of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) that increase road safety and enhance driver comfort.
Through features such as automatic lane keeping or adaptive cruise control, ADAS relieves the driver of some tasks – reducing the risk of human errors.
Another function of ADAS can be to monitor a driver’s health to sound the alarm when he or she becomes distracted or unwell.
To implement these advanced ADAS solutions in your vehicles, you need to build complex systems that encompass:
- solid-state lidar for long-range, high-resolution 3D sensing
- compact and low-power 140-GHz radar and camera sensors to collect reliable data
- artificial intelligence to combine and make sense of that data
As an R&D hub that combines hardware and software capabilities, imec is in a perfect position to assist you.
The emergence of ADAS will put an end to cloud AI’s dominant position and will require AI solutions running at the (extreme) edge. Moving in the direction of (extreme) edge AI, chip architectures are required that use very small, highly energy-efficient chip sets to process limited data sets in a cleverer way. In its industrial affiliation program on machine learning, imec, together with industrial partners, leads the quest for computationally- and energy-efficient analog-in-memory computing solutions built on emerging non-volatile memory devices.
Imec’s AnIA chip, bringing deep neural network calculations to IoT edge devices.
Technologies for the connected car
Our future car will resemble a highly complex IoT system, equipped with a multitude of connected sensors.
We will open it with an app on our smartphone, which facilitates sharing models. It will stream our digital content. And most importantly, it will communicate with other vehicles and the road infrastructure.
The challenge for automotive companies is to integrate communication technologies that guarantee reliable and secure connections, in all circumstances. To do this, they can build on imec’s expertise in secure proximity.
Micro-location technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy and ultra-wide band enable applications such as smart locks. And will accommodate other exciting automotive use cases such as in-car infant detection or automatic adjustment of personalized seat positions. Join one of our R&D programs to get access to our technology platforms and tune them to your own product requirements. Or enter into a bilateral collaboration with imec.
GaN power devices: more efficient electric and hybrid vehicles
To bring down energy consumption and increase the driving range of electric vehicles, we need ultra-efficient power electronic circuits – both in the car and the charging infrastructure.
By constructing switches and converters with wide-bandgap materials such as GaN, they can operate at higher switching frequencies and at higher temperatures, leading to higher efficiency.
Imec explores next-generation GaN technology that yields a higher level of integration and higher performances. Join our GaN research program or enter into our GaN-IC MPW program to level up the efficiency of your car electronics.
To unlock the full potential of GaN power technology, imec monolithically co-integrated a half-bridge and drivers in one GaN-IC chip.
Develop your advanced automotive technologies with imec
There is a limitless number of ways in which nano- and digital technology can transform the automotive sector by integrating complex functions on chips – reducing volume and power consumption.
Want to work with us on the car of the future? Here’s an overview of our offering:
- Join one of our R&D programs to get priority access to novel technologies and to help shape our research roadmap.
- Enter into an exclusive bilateral collaboration with imec to enlist the support of our researchers and infrastructure towards the development of your custom solution.
- License one of imec’s IP blocks and tune it to your needs.
- Turn to us for the design, development, prototyping and low-volume manufacturing of your automotive ASIC (application specific integrated circuit).
