Major automotive players are working together to fix the connectivity headache of incompatible systems in your next vehicle.
You know how frustrating it is when your phone won’t connect to your car? Well, imagine being the engineer trying to make dozens of cameras, sensors, and screens all talk to each other inside a modern vehicle.
A group of heavyweight car manufacturers, parts suppliers, and chip makers have just announced they’re forming something called the OpenGMSL Association. Not the most catchy name, but this could be important for the cars we’ll be driving in the coming years.
Cars are just computers on wheels now
If you’ve bought, driven, or just been a passenger in a modern car, you’ll have noticed they’re rather crammed with tech. Cameras that help you park, screens everywhere you look, and often even systems that can take over some driving functions entirely.
All these gadgets need to share massive amounts of data, and quickly. When your car is deciding whether to slam on the brakes because it thinks someone’s stepped into the road, you don’t want any delay caused by different bits of kit struggling to communicate.
The trouble is, unlike your home Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, there hasn’t been a universal standard for how all this stuff connects together inside vehicles. Each manufacturer has been doing their own thing, making everything more expensive and complicated than it needs to be.
Rather than starting from scratch, the new association is taking Analog Devices’ GMSL technology (which already works in millions of cars) and turning it into an open standard anyone can use.
“With over 1 billion GMSL ICs shipped and adoption by more than 25 global OEMs and 50 Tier-1 suppliers, GMSL is one of the most mature and road-proven high-speed video link technologies in the automotive industry,” explained Paul Fernando, who’s heading up the new association.
“OpenGMSL builds on this strong foundation to accelerate innovation across autonomous driving, ADAS, and next-gen infotainment — growing an already thriving ecosystem into an open, collaborative future.”
The group is structured as a non-profit with an independent board, and they’re keen to get more companies involved. They’re also insisting on proper testing for anything claiming to be OpenGMSL-compatible, so hopefully, we won’t end up with the kind of “works most of the time” situation we’ve experienced with some tech standards.
Big players want to solve the vehicle connectivity mess
It’s always a good sign when competitors agree to work together, and this initiative has attracted some industry muscle already.
HH Lee, R&D Leader at Hyundai Mobis, which supplies systems to many car manufacturers, said: “Our company has leveraged GMSL technology in our vehicles for many years. We’re excited to see Analog Devices Inc take the initiative to standardize GMSL through the formation of the OpenGMSL Association.”
Even the companies that make the actual silicon chips are involved. Sudipto Bose from GlobalFoundries explains that “the solutions developed by this new initiative will address the need for high-speed, low-latency chips to support the real-time sensing functions and immersive user experiences that are revolutionising in-vehicle connectivity.”
Anyone who remembers the early days of HDMI or USB knows that just because something claims to be compatible doesn’t mean it always works seamlessly. That’s why it’s encouraging to see several testing specialists joining the association from day one.
Thomas Goetzl, VP and GM of Automotive & Energy Solutions at Keysight Technologies, commented: “By ensuring robust device compliance and fostering a mature test ecosystem, we aim to accelerate the maturity of the entire test ecosystem, driving innovation and enhancing safety across the automotive industry.”
What this means for connectivity in your next vehicle
While this might sound like industry inside baseball, it could have real implications for the vehicles we’ll be driving in the near future.
For starters, when manufacturers can use standardised components that are guaranteed to work together, development costs should come down. This will potentially make advanced safety features more affordable in everyday cars.
It should also mean faster innovation. When engineers don’t have to reinvent the wheel (or in this case, the data connection) for every new model, they can focus on developing better features instead.
And perhaps most importantly for those of us who’ve experienced the frustration of car tech that doesn’t quite work right, standardisation typically leads to more reliable systems. The more manufacturers using the same standard, the more thoroughly it gets tested in the real world.
With modern cars generating more data than ever, sorting out how all that information moves around is fundamental to making the next generation of safer and smarter vehicles.
(Photo by Dekler Ph)
See also: 5GAA demos lifesaving NTN and V2X tech for connected cars
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