Automotive Conference: Pointing the way to electronica 2022

• electronica Automotive Conference was held on November 4, 2021
• Top speakers were from Bosch, Cariad, NXP, Vitesco, Wolfspeed
• Growing electronics market invigorates world’s leading trade fair

Automotive stopover: The electronica Automotive Conference brought together top experts from the electronics industry in Munich between electronica trade fair years for the first time on November 4, 2021. The focus was on the transformation of the car into a “smart” IoT device with an electric drive. The conference was organized jointly with the German Electrical and Digital Industries’ Association (ZVEI).

“When the car becomes a smart device: The first electronica Automotive Conference between trade fair years was a valuable stopover to electronica in November 2022,” explains Dr. Reinhard Pfeiffer, Deputy Chairman and CEO of Messe München. “The global electronics market is projected to continue its recovery,” continues Christoph Stoppok, Managing Director of the German Electrical and Digital Industries’ Association (ZVEI). “That will also be reflected at the world’s largest gathering of the electronics industry.” Many companies are already preparing to participate, including well-known companies such as Arrow Electronics, Infineon Technologies and Samsung Semiconductor, as well as new exhibitors such as ProLight Opto Technology from Taiwan, Navitas Semiconductor from the U.S., and teclad from Italy.

High-ranking exchange on the automotive segment

Sharing knowledge and networking was the aim of the electronica Automotive Conference on November 4 in Munich, which brought together just under 80 top experts. “The biggest transformation in the automotive industry has begun. It’s now time to take everyone with us on the journey and work intensively on areas where the need for optimization is the greatest,” explained Andreas Wolf, CEO of Vitesco Technologies, in his keynote address.

High-profile specialists spent a day discussing the major challenges of a mobility world that revolve around a smart IoT device on electrically powered wheels that is mutating into a point of sale. As Dr. Andreas Lock from Robert Bosch explained, this will require transforming conventional decentralized E/E architectures into vehicle-centric, zone-oriented architectures. This is the only way to manage the increasing complexity of future vehicle features and the growing volume of data, and, in combination with a cloud connection, transfer additional features or updates via OTA (over-the-air), for example, as part of innovative revenue models.

Cariad, an independent automotive software company of the Volkswagen Group, is working on a uniform E/E architecture including automotive cloud for all brands of the Group. For Dr. Peter Schiele of Cariad, the car of the future must be reimagined from a software perspective in order to transform it into a “smart” companion. Lars Reger of NXP Semiconductors added that an important step toward a safe robot on wheels is “on the one hand, new, innovative technologies, but on the other, even closer collaboration with partners from different ecosystems – from the smartphone, smart home and smart city to Industry 4.0 and IT.”

A rethinking is also taking place in the field of power electronics. “Due to the intense pressure for more energy efficiency, especially for higher e-car ranges, smaller batteries and lower charging costs, the automotive industry and all other users of power electronics will see a fundamental shift from silicon to silicon-carbide based systems,” says Ole Gerkensmeyer of Wolfspeed.

The discussion will continue at electronica 2022 in Munich – and in other top electronics segments such as embedded, semiconductors and wireless.