On a recent business trip to Silicon Valley, I was posed with a (not so) tough choice when the rep at the car rental counter informed me they were out of cars in my category. I was given a choice between a minivan and a yellow sports convertible. Oh gosh! I looked at the spring California weather – bright blue sky – and decided to get the convertible in place of my regular ride that can seat five and carry three pieces of luggage. (If you’ve ever rented a car, you know what that means.)
As I got in my car, I realized that it was brand new with only nine miles on it… then it struck me that it had a million buttons on the dash to control a zillion things. Sweet! After recovering from the initial dazzle, I got on the road to get to my meeting and needed to join a conference call on the way. The car had a Bluetooth® hands-free phone but I could not connect to it. Given enough time, I would have figured it out, but that day I had to live with the frustration of having access to a technology and not being able to use it due to complexity. I realized that Near Field Communication (NFC) solves this complicated pairing process. If NFC was integrated in the car, I could have paired my phone conveniently with a simple tap.
NFC is a short-range wireless technology designed to bring ease and convenience to interactions between devices such as smartphones, headsets and car infotainment systems to name a few. Many consumer electronics and industrial equipment now have the NFC feature for various applications such as Bluetooth® and Wi-Fi pairing, payments, authentication, managing content and so on. Coming back to my story of the rental car, NFC in automotive is a new and emerging sector. While Bluetooth pairing seems to be the most common use case right now; there are others that can utilize NFC to bring the same ease and convenience of interaction that is now available in many consumer electronics devices.
NFC integration in automotive can enable many applications; it is easy to envision that you could use your NFC-enabled smartphone to get access to a rental or shared car by simply tapping it on the door handle. You could also use NFC to retrieve diagnostic data, pass driver preferences for the seat, pass the settings to the infotainment system for radio stations or make an in-car payment. In each of these use cases, the ubiquitous smartphone becomes the terminal of choice, eliminating the need for custom interfaces for each. Furthermore, smartphones with an NFC interface can be used to gather small amounts of data from the car and pass it to the cloud using its own data connectivity, essentially connecting the car to the rest of the IoT ecosystem – making it even smarter.
TI has a wide range of NFC products that serve many application areas including those in the automotive market. Two products come to mind: TI’s NFC device (TRF7970A) and NFC transponder (RF430CL330H) are also planned for auto AEC-Q100 qualification by end of the year. Paired with other wireless connectivity options and automotive processors from TI, NFC offers an easy add-on for the smart cars of today.
To read more posts related to Smart Transportation, check out the blogs below:
- Cars are becoming rolling sensor platforms on Behind the Wheel
- Here’s why head-up displays are coming to a windshield near you on Enlightened: The TI DLP® Blog
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