One such initiative is the Automotive In-Vehicle Networking (IVN) Club. Established in 2010, the NXP IVN Club aims to promote the development of automotive networking technology in China by sharing state-of-the-art technology developments and discussing options for joint initiatives in an open dialog with regional opinion leaders.

The third IVN Club meeting recently took place in Chongqing, a mega-city in Southwest China which is part of the densely populated Sichuan province. With almost 29 million people and 16.4% GDP, it is one of the world’s fastest growing cities. It is also a growing automotive hub with a 10-kilometer “Auto Town” integrating automobile production, research and development, trade and tourism functions.

Key topics covered in this year’s agenda included current global automotive market trends, the latest IVN technologies such as CAN Flexible Data-Rate, Partial Networking, Ethernet , FlexRay and how OEMs could further cooperate to apply technology in China.

Twelve leading Chinese-based car manufacturers including – SAIC (Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation) , FAW Research & Development Center, FAW Car, ChangAn, ChangAn New Energy, BYD, BAIC (Beijing Automotive Industry Corporation), CATARC (China Automotive Technology & Research Center), PATAC (PAN Asia Technical Automotive Center), Geely, Foton and Chery – participated in with international automotive experts to discuss the latest trends in networking system design and diagnostics.

Results of the IVN Club seminar were extremely positive, with the OEMs expressing lots of interest in raising the bar in networking ICs and optimizing their networking solutions. NXP also learned more about Chinese OEMs’ technology challenges, which will help us to optimize regional support and improve customer experience.

Ultimately, the event brought global automotive expertise and Chinese OEMs closer together to establish networking standards in a very strategic growth area for the industry.

Seat belts, air bags and anti-lock braking are familiar safety features in modern cars. The automotive electronics industry continues to push safety related innovation with such systems as drowsiness monitoring, forward collision warning, and lane departure warning, all of which are starting to appear in high-end models and will no doubt become mainstream over time. Then there is the anticipation of autonomous vehicles with active collision avoidance technology, ultimately leading to smart cars that can join multi-vehicle platoons. However, despite recent legislative changes permitting them in a few US states, robotic or ‘driverless’ cars are not going to appear on our roads in significant numbers any time soon.

Courtesy of Cohda Wireless

Consequently, other measures are needed in the medium term to help make our roads safer and reduce the cost of road accidents. One approach that is gaining support in many quarters is the deployment of vehicle communication systems. As part of the larger Intelligent Transport System (ITS) initiative, the aim is to use the wireless exchange of traffic information and safety warnings to avoid accidents and reduce congestion. For example, you can be alerted in real-time that cars up to 1km ahead have suddenly started braking, giving you sufficient warning to start slowing down early. Similarly, when approaching an intersection a you can prepare to give way if you know other cars are in the vicinity and approaching you at dangerous speeds, even before you can see them. It should also be possible to reduce incidents involving vehicles entering or exiting highways and improve traffic flow at the same time by the use of this technology.

These systems will be based on wireless networks using Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), as defined by the IEEE802.11p automotive WiFi standard and operating in the 5.9GHz band. This allows communication either between cars and roadside traffic infrastructure units (C2I) or from one car to another (C2C).

The US is currently conducting a large-scale trial of C2X in Michigan and its outcome could lead the Department of Transportation to mandate implementation in new vehicles. In Europe, members of the CAR 2 CAR (C2C) Communication Consortium, which includes 12 major car manufacturers, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to deploy ITS services from 2015. Most recently, NXP and Cohda Wireless (a specialist in wireless communications for automotive safety applications) have become the first electronics companies to sign this MoU. NXP and Cohda have also announced RoadLINKTM as their technology for secure C2X in on-board and roadside communication units and lesswire AG, a German embedded radio solutions provider for the automotive industry, is already developing modules based on RoadLINK.

I hope these developments will help prevent the WHO’s forecast from becoming a reality. For sure they will deliver a safer road transport system for all of us.

Firstly, the cards used were pre-paid magnetic stripe, thus very easy to create and clone. The magnetic stripe card data was retrieved from the back-end systems. The data then only needed to be transmitted over the Internet around the globe and copied to blank magnetic stripe cards locally (like hotel cards). The cloned cards were then distributed to individuals in each country, thus enabling money to be retrieved from ATMs all over the world with the same account data over and over again.

As the data was from prepaid debit cards, the transaction amount was subtracted from the preloaded balance, this circumvents most real-time network checks and network security mechanisms. Had EMV chip cards using Dynamic Data Authentication (DDA) chip cards been used, it would have been impossible to clone card on limited stored data and to tamper with the card limits. A DDA chip card is validated by the ATM or POS terminal, before any transaction takes place. This is achieved by exchanging signed certificates and random number challenges between card and backend via the terminal.

Had the cards contained a chip, even changing the card limits in the back-end would have had no effect. Without breaking the security features of the chip card, secret keys cannot be cloned onto a new empty smartcard. By asking the chip card to encode random challenges, and validating results and signatures in the back-end, originality can be proven. After validation, transactions are individually signed, using transaction counters and other mechanisms to prevent replaying transactions a second time. Any validation or transaction is preceded by entering the smartcard pin code, which proves the owner of the smartcard is authorized the use.

In DDA cards, the pin is still required and a unique signed electronic datagram is created, describing the details of the transaction. It is impossible to re-use such a datagram a second time, due to the amount, the transaction counter and many other items encoded into the signed datagram. This makes the DDA card much more secure against fraud than the magnetic stripe card.

Secondly, as hack was made into financial processor of pre-paid cards it can be presumed that sufficient security measure may not have been in place. Hackers were able to update card data as well as balance limits to ‘unlimited’ to ensure they could withdraw up to the maximal cash limit of at each ATM.  This means the data may not have been stored following best-practice as well as access not protected as well. One of the required standards is the PIC-DSS standard of the PCI Security Standards Council, which is recognized by international payment associations, such as Visa and MasterCard. Even when certified by a Qualified Security Assessor, the PCI-DSS demands to remediate vulnerabilities and to rescan and self assess the infrastructure on a regular basis. This is costly, but if omitted or postponed, breaches can occur.

A system is as strong as its weakest link. In this case there were two weak links exploited globally; the processor in the backend and the magnetic stripe card. Simple security mechanisms on the back-end, such as not storing pin/login codes, but only salted hashes in databases, no storing of card details in plain, but only encrypted would help support security in the system. At the card level, introduction of DDA cards which protect consumer and bank data are also a front-line step in securing financial transactions.

NXP and our partner Cohda Wireless, together with 12 leading car manufacturers including Audi and BMW, are delighted to announce the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding to bring intelligent transport systems and services to European roads by 2015.

1994 was a great year for innovation. For instance, the Channel Tunnel opened, the Java programming language was released, and the world’s first satellite digital television service was launched. 1994 also heralded the introduction of NXP’s MIFARE technology, which has become an essential element in more than 40 different applications especially for transport ticketing solutions, loyalty programmes and access management across the globe. In particular, it has gone on to revolutionize the ease and efficiency of public transport.

 Commuters old enough to remember the metro railways of yesteryear will recall the archaic ticketing systems that pre-dated contactless schemes. As if the morning rush wasn’t bad enough, chaotic scenes at both cash desks and ticket barriers would often greet bleary-eyed city-dwellers as they embarked on their daily commute. Whether it was struggling to find the right money or feeding paper tickets into uncooperative machines, travelling on the underground could be quite an ordeal.

 It’s safe to say that MIFARE has changed the lives of many commuters since those days. 

Now the leading application development platform for contactless solutions is used in more than 650 cities worldwide to improve their public transport systems. And not just on the metro-multi-modal contactless travel cards, such as the one recently announced by the Moscow Department of Transport, enable commuters to use a single secure smart card to ride on metros, trains, buses, trams and for further services like bike rental or road- tolling.

According to ABI Research, MIFARE solutions are accounted for more than 80% of all contactless ticketing credentials deployed which is based on a substantial product portfolio, multi-application solutions and trust. On the innovation side MIFARE is continuing to evolve. Imagine how convenient it is to simply pull out your NFC-enabled smartphone and – thanks to embedded MIFARE technology – use it as tickets, keys or cash like people in Bangkok or Dubai. Going even further, MIFARE4Mobile functionality will enable customers to purchase tickets through web-shops and transfer them to the secure element in the phone, accelerating the use of NFC smartphones with MIFARE functionality.

As we’ll celebrate the 20^th anniversary of MIFARE technology next year, we also look forward to a future where NXP will continue to set the agenda in contactless innovation. What over-the-air application would you like to see on your smart card or smart phone?

One of the interviews was with our very own Colin Maudry, so I thought it would be useful to expand on how NXP is using DITA and give some facts and figures.

As mentioned in the interview, we primarily use DITA as the source format for what we call our “value propositions”. This content is essentially the marketing narrative about our products and consists of a description, features and applications plus a few other optional bits and pieces. This content ends up in a few different outputs including: data sheets, product web pages and mobile apps as shown in the following diagram.

Each of the circled bits of content is a topic, which is a discrete content resource that can be re-used across multiple documents (or maps in DITA-speak). This is particularly useful for applications lists, for example, where many products share that same list of ‘standard’ applications. This pays dividends when translating as we do not end up translating the same content time and time again, which results in more consistent translated content and lower costs.

Here are a few of the reasons we have chosen DITA:

• Provides an ‘agnostic’ source format for multiple output formats
• Separates content structure (meaning) from style (look and feel)
• Topic-based approach enables content to be easily re-used across documents
• Offers native support for translation/localization
• As it’s XML based, can be integrated to existing XML publication processes
• It’s an open standard so better tool support and a broader user community

Of course we have not been using DITA since the dawn of time so we had to migrate the content from legacy formats into DITA. Luckily for us all of our legacy source formats were XML, so it was relatively simple to transform this to the DITA target format using XSLT. The migration took place in two main rounds. During the first round we ignored any potential re-use and migrated each document with it’s own set of topics, whereas during the second round we tried to de-duplicate any topics where the content was identical.

Roughly 50% of our new data sheets are still created using proprietary (SGML) EDDs in Adobe FrameMaker. For these we still have to (manually) extract the content into DITA following publication, but this is something we are seeking to automate in the near future with the longer-term goal to move to DITA as the source format for all natural language content. For the other 50% of data sheets the DITA value propositions are used when we generate the data sheet along with other topics generated on-the-fly from our product information database (more on that in another post).

Having all this content in DITA enabled us to easily translate large volumes of content to Chinese and Japanese (see figures below). We have set up a partially automated workflow to deal with the translation requests which natively supports DITA and required minimal setup to set a bridge between our content and our translation providers. Without using DITA and related technologies such as XLIFF, such large-scale translation simply would not have been feasible or cost-effective.

Finally here are some stats reflecting the status today:

• Number of DITA maps: 10,000+
• English (source): 6,281
• Chinese: 536
• Japanese: 2,991
• Other: 392
• Number of DITA topics: 40,000+
• On average a map is re-used for 2.27 products
• Maximum number of times a map is re-used is for 223 products!
• As of December 2012, our source DITA content contained 1,018,093 words including 489,705 repetitions

We are increasingly aware that the innovation process is enhanced when working collaboratively with consumers and taking our community’s considerations into account. In an environment underpinned by innovation, I believe that crowdsourcing will be the next big thing in the high-tech industry.

Crowdsourcing (Wikipedia), is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

ID solutions are present in many aspects of our lives and often consumers will have the best ideas about these technologies and how they can be developed to improve our everyday lives.  As a semiconductor company, we see it an opportunity to ask the community about the next big innovation or killer application.

Yes, we want to hear from you!

For this, NXP has developed a digital marketing platform. The Idea Generation platform is an intuitive discussion and sharing tool which encourages people to come together to vote for and share the best identification ideas. So, take a tour of our virtual 3D city, which covers a wealth of trusted smart life solutions, demonstrating the influence of ID verification in almost everything we do, from checking our Facebook to paying with a credit card.

At our platform you can submit your idea(s), get inspired by solutions of others and discuss the next big thing in ID. Our community will then vote for their favorite ideas. The developer that comes up with the most popular solution will then be invited by NXP’s business developer to work together on a business case. So finally, your smart solution can become a reality!

The NXP Idea Generation Platform has been live for a few weeks now and we’ve already seen the power of crowdsourcing. There have been some great new ideas and my personal favorite is the smart fridge from Shakti Shenoy. With the smart fridge I’d never run out of the basics again!  

Shakti’s solution: A display in front of the fridge/storage place can list presence or absence of a product (e.g. milk/eggs/cookies) and the number of them present. When the items go below a threshold the system will raise a ‘purchase request’, which can be received on your smartphone.

Do you also see a smart innovation in ID-technology? We’d appreciate hearing your ideas! Check out our platform for inspiration, to upload your idea and most importantly, join the conversation!

So, what is GLONASS ? Basically, it’s the only alternative to GPS in terms of global coverage and comparable precision, and was originally developed by the Soviet Union in 1976. And according to Wikipedia, GLONASS is the Russian Federal Space Agency’s most expensive program, consuming a third of its budget in 2010.

GLONASS is becoming increasing popular as a sat nav standard in Russia (obviously), but also in markets such as India. Auto manufacturers looking to target these territories need to ensure they have on-board support for GLONASS if they want to truly appeal to local car buyers. This is particularly important in the Russian market, as it looks likely that, in the near future, a significant import tax will be levied on vehicles that do not support the GLONASS system.

It’s reassuring to see these types of automated alert systems now starting to be implemented all around the world.

GloTOP is another great solution that supports our Connected Car vision, where the traffic infrastructure and the vehicles that use it are linked together to improve the driving experience, make our roads safer, and help to reduce unnecessary carbon emissions. And by uniquely integrating GLONASS, GPS, GSM and NFC functionality into a single package, NXP is making it easier (and more cost-effective) for OEMs to produce vehicles that can get connected, whichever market they’re in.

GloTOP is part of our Smart Telematics range of solutions, which enable multiple applications such as emergency alert capability, congestion avoidance, on-board diagnostics, vehicle location tracking or fleet management. What other functionality could drivers benefit from as cars become more and more connected?

The EE Times and EDN ACE Awards, developed in 2005, are awarded each year to celebrate the individuals, companies and products that demonstrate innovation and leadership in electronics industry. NXP has been selected as a finalist across 3 (!) categories, with:

the TFA9887 Mobile Audio Design Team named as finalist for Design Team of the Year;

the DALI and DMX512 Development Platforms for Wired Lighting Control Networks named as finalist for Ultimate Products – Development Kits & Evaluation Boards;

and the CBTL05024 high-performance, low-power switch for Thunderbolt interface named as finalist for Ultimate Products – check the press release.

Winners will be announced on April 23 at an awards ceremony taking place during DESIGN West 2013 in San Jose.

The ACE Awards are judged by industry experts, comprised of the leading voices of academia and industry executives.  The 2013 Annual Creativity in Electronics Awards event is on April 23rd, 2013 at the Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose. This event is co-located with DESIGN West and ESC Silicon Valley.  Stay tuned and read more here.

Integrated Circuits, or microchips, have been propelling massive technology innovations in the last decades. They appear in electronic equipment as well as in passports, banking cards, LEDs and light bulbs, toys, public transport tickets, first aid bandages, door locks, cars, books, pets, smart energy meters and running shoes. Just to name a few usages.

For B2B marketers, the marketing of these Integrated Circuits to the highly educated, demanding no-nonsense online savvy diverse target audience of Design Engineers is a marketing delicacy…

Internet of things
Semiconductors are rapidly changing the way we interact with objects. If you think of it, almost anything can be enhanced with chips. Objects can be linked to the internet (Internet of Things) to make them e.g. controllable over large distances, to optimize the energy consumption of devices, to recover stolen objects or missing car keys, to identify counterfeit of consumer goods, or to transfer data from one device to another. To get a grasp of various ideas of what applications can be enhanced by semiconductors, have a look at NXP’s recently launched Idea Generation Platform (you can even post or rank an idea yourself).

Engineers of innovation
Semiconductors are designed in products by Design Engineers. Without engineers there would be little innovation, and without innovation there would be little economic growth.  In that sense, Design Engineers can be seen as the key enablers of future economic growth; in the current economic climate, something to think about.

The marketing of semiconductors to Design Engineers requires delivering integrated digital marketing campaigns:

- with relevant and timely (most technical) content,
- that is available in the most convenient format(s)
- at the best moments and (online) places,
- with calls-to-action that directly add value to the daily job of the engineer.

Today’s successful B2B marketer should posses various integrated marketing tactics and digital marketing competencies. Gone are the days that ad hoc launches of online banner ad campaigns, the issuing in isolation of mass-media press releases or stand-alone adwords campaigns could do the marketing job. Generic marketing objectives such as raising awareness by x%, building brand preference by y% or raising the number of ‘Likes’ by z% are accompanied or replaced by marketing KPIs relating to conversion rates, lead generation and ROI. To make best use of every marketing dollar spent, conversion rates in various stages of the customer engagement cycle are continuously measured and closely monitored, and marketing tactics and media plans are selected based on their ability to drive traffic to a landing page and subsequently to generate conversion via compelling calls-to-action.

Engagement cycle
The metaphor of the sales funnel, or better: customer engagement cycle, is based on the fact that reaching out to customers at the right, decision-influencing moment is key for marketers.  A first step in this funnel/cycle-approach is to assure that products are considered for inclusion in the long-list of available options at the beginning of the decision journey and subsequently to understand:

- what customer,
- is at what moment,
- where in the cycle,
- and what kind of information or content does he or she need,
- in what desired format,
- to move to the next stage of the cycle?

Contradictio in terminis
A well-thought approach to Marketing Automation – not too long ago considered to be a contradictio-in-terminis – is of the essence to measure and monitor what works best and what works less, and to tailor and contextualize marketing efforts to the needs and desires of (potential) customers in various stages of the sales cycle. This goes especially for companies focusing on mass markets with online-savvy audiences. Marketing Automation however is not the Holy Grail; it’s not a goal, it’s a means. Marketing tools are useless without a clear understanding of the customer needs and wishes and a shared vision between marketing and sales on how contacts should be converted into leads. In that respect, nothing has changed.

An overview of various landing pages of NXP’s integrated marketing campaigns that are currently live can be found here. Some examples of recent marketing tactics used include (variations on) crowd sourcing for idea generation, content curation for thought leadership, content marketing for product introduction and video sharing and gamification for engagement.