"Integrated Sensors for Automotive Safety Applications"

- Dirk Hammerschmidt, Infineon

Active and passive automotive systems heavily rely on information that is gathered by sensors that are distributed all over the vehicle. In order to collect physically relevant data those sensors have to be located in positions that allow observing the relevant processes and often have to tolerate the harsh environmental conditions that appear at these locations. Thus sensing technology and sensor design have to be chosen and developed in a close relation to the application. On the other hand sensors have to guarantee a sufficiently reliable delivery of the sensed safety relevant information over a distance up to several meters. The definition of the sensor interfaces is restricted by the requirement of limiting the amount of connections between the multitudes of distributed sensors and the central safety processing units that make use of the measurements. Finally the introduction of the functional safety standard ISO26262 brings up new aspects and requirements that migrate from the system level down to the sensor definition.
The tutorial will provide an introduction to the concepts of safety relevant sensors starting from application driven requirements, over the sensing technologies and the related integrated signal processing steps up to the transmission of the measurement data via specific communication channels.