In this article, Winbond looks at how CMS is helping to transform the driving experience, considers its numerous advantages and looks at the vital role of memory technology.
As an auxiliary device, CMS boasts several advantages over traditional side and rear-view mirrors:
Wind Resistance and Noise Reduction
Conventional mirrors create wind resistance at high speeds, impacting fuel efficiency. CMS, with its streamlined design, reduces wind resistance and minimises wind noise, while enhancing a vehicle's aesthetics. In fact, CMS can save up to 1.3% of fuel consumption, a particularly welcome feature for all-day drives.
Blind Spot Elimination
CMS provides an expanded field of view compared to standard mirrors, effectively eliminating blind spots. It automatically adjusts the viewing angle when changing lanes, reversing, or parking, thereby improving convenience and safety.
Credit: Winbond
Weather Resilience
Unlike traditional mirrors, CMS remains unaffected by adverse weather conditions, such as mist and ice. It also works in challenging scenarios, such as low light, poor visibility, or glare.
While CMS is essentially a camera and display system, its implementation in the automotive environment is intricate. To ensure absolute reliability, the new standard imposes stringent requirements on several key CMS components:
- Camera-Monitor System: The system must maintain a minimum display frame rate of 30FPS, with imaging times of less than 55ms and image delays under 200ms.
- Alarm Device: The new standard mandate features like blind spot detection and obstacle alerts, requiring the system to promptly notify drivers of any potential dangers through both audible and visual alarms.
- Processor and Sensor: To guarantee reliability under various conditions, the chip must meet AEC-Q100 standards for reliability, adhere to ISO26262 for safety, and comply with IATF16949 for the production system.
Credit: Windond
Role of Memory in CMS
Memory in the camera-monitor system plays a pivotal role in ensuring driving safety. It needs to provide ample bandwidth and transmission speed to handle real-time decoding.
DDR3, known for its low power consumption, cost-efficiency, and high performance, is an optimal choice for CMS. Winbond’s 1.5V x8 and x16 DDR3, for example, offers speeds of up to 2133Mbps in standard-compliant configurations, providing excellent cost performance for automotive equipment suppliers.
CMS's alarm device needs robust memory storage for complex codes to be reliable. In this regard, Winbond’s OctalNAND, with its larger memory density and cost-effectiveness as an alternative solution for the high density NOR. OctalNAND offers 1-4Gb density and a maximum throughput of up to 240Mb/s, along with on-chip ECC for improved reliability, ensuring the NAND Flash’s reliability is almost the same as NOR.
Additionally, the data processing speed of the sensor and the SoC must meet the system's operational requirements to prevent screen freezes or delays.
Winbond is able to offer a range of standard SDRAM, including DDR, DDR2, DDR3 and DDR4, and LPDDR series memories to fulfil the needs of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and CMS.
Notably, Winbond's memory products not only meet the technical performance requirements of the new CMS standard but also hold various certifications, including AEC Q100, ISO26262, and ISO16949, ensuring reliability, safety, and production system compliance. This adherence to stringent standards alleviates concerns related to automotive certification for CMS manufacturers.
Memory technology continues to provide crucial support for CMS and those memory products are poised to accelerate the adoption of electronic side and rear-view mirrors, making them more accessible to drivers sooner than later.
Author details: Winbond Electronics is a total memory solutions provider based in Taiwan
