Telit’s role
The recent acquisition of NXP’s Automotive On-board Platform (ATOP) expands Telit’s offering to serve the engineering needs of those developing these exciting new automotive applications.
ATOP is an integrated, certified component that has all the functionality needed to create standalone On-Board Units (OBUs) for road pricing, eCall, and other certified or authenticated services and applications. By integrating cellular and positioning technology with near-field communications, ATOP provides a comprehensive suite of communications tools – and a roadmap to include new “hot” technologies to enable new vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications in compatible form factors.
On the software side there is an open, multi-application development environment based on IBM’s J9 virtual machine, which can execute JAVA code – and with three embedded processors – there’s plenty of processing overhead for even the most demanding automotive applications.
Easy in-car integration is enabled by a broad range of interfaces, which include CAN and USB, multiple serial inter-processor buses, A/D and D/A converters, and analog in & outputs for audio signals. In addition ATOP can be employed as a front-end to more advanced, open-service telematics platforms.
Of course, as we have all come to learn, anything connected to the Internet is subject to attack. In situations involving payments and even personal safety, it is all the more important to protect the data in the vehicle as well as in transit. While traditional software solutions abound, there remain many potential vulnerabilities. Moreover, as connectivity in the vehicle continues to expand across technologies, the surface area for attack also expands, providing easy access to in-car networks as well as the Internet. That’ why ATOP employs embedded hardware security for rock-solid private key protection to provide the utmost in privacy and data integrity. Thanks to these on-board security resources, product developers and manufacturers can offer devices