Taiwan’s Nexcom is pushing powerful computing power into the connected car market with its news VTC 7230 and 7240 units, and targeting the industrial IoT space with its NISE 3720 gateways. All three units use brand new Intel CPUs, which have recently launched and promise strong performance per watt – important for cars whose systems need to work whether the engine is on and charging the battery, or running from battery power alone.
The two units geared for the automotive sector, the VTC 7230 and 7240, use an Intel i3-5010U and i7-5650U respectively. The CPUs are cut in Intel’s 14nm Broadwell architecture, are more commonly found in notebooks, and are both ultra-low voltage (ULV) dual-core chips. The i3 is the less powerful processor, clocked at 2.1GHz, with Intel’s HD Graphics 5500 GPU providing the horsepower needed to render and transcode the video captured by the car’s cameras.
The i7 version features a turbo mode, meaning its CPU can change from 2.2GHz up to 3.2GHz depending on the workload. As well as being faster, it also features the more powerful HD 6000 Graphics unit, and 600 million more transistors than its little brother, with 1900 million. Both CPUs have a maximum power consumption (thermal design power / TDP) of 15 watts – far less than the 84 watts drawn by the CPU in the desktop that RIoT is composed on.
The two units will be using this processing power to provide the signal processing, computer vision, and video transcoding capabilities for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), and video surveillance.
In addition, the computers can provide vehicle tracking services via integrated GPS (a u-blox NEO-M8N module) and support for dual-WWAN cellular connections and up to 3 SIM cards. Dual external hard drives provide the storage capacity needed to capture on-board video, and the cellular link enables the unit to offload video if required. An optional OBD-II function can add vehicle diagnostics to the Nexcom platform, and any OEM that incorporates it into their design.
“The pursuit of driving safety and efficiency has been the driving force for advancements in in-vehicle technologies,” says Steven Wu, Nexcom’s GM Vertical Industry Platform business unit. Intel’s Samuel Cravatta adds that the CPUs’ “expanded hardware security helps protect systems against malware intrusions and accelerate data encryption.”
Moving onto the industrial gateway, the NISE 3720 supports a range of 4th and 5th generation i7 Intel processors. It has been designed as a bridge between the multitude of different industrial communications protocols, as well as the brains behind supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems.
With WiFi, 3G and 4G connectivity, the 3720 can backhaul the data it collects from the family of fieldbus (IEC 61158) protocols that will be feeding it information from the industrial installation – as well as from video feeds from security and monitoring cameras.
The I/O options for the 3720 have been designed to accommodate the multitude of different setups that it will encounter in the field. They include Profibus, Profinet, DeviceNet, Ethernet (IP), and EtherCAT. This lets it sit between power line communication (PLC) and business clouds, acting as the bridge between the two radically different operational environments.
“Factories are changing, looking for ways to squeeze greater efficiency from daily operations. Industrial computing platforms like our 3720 are required to perform more tasks, with a low power envelope while delivering high performance and reliability,” said Joe Lin, Nexcom’s GM IoT Automation.
With a fanless design, housed in an aluminum enclosure, Nexcom says the unit offers enhanced electromagnetic compatibility and electrical insulation – so that it can be installed without interfering with machinery. It is safe to operate between -20°C and 60°C.