Gallery: On a fast route to connected vehicle technology

A make-believe high-speed bus

Usually, PCIe connections take the form of a backplane on a motherboard. PCIe operates at speeds high enough to force all the connections to reside in one place. This is a limitation that car makers have found to be problematic when designs would benefit from, say, locating the infotainment controller in one place and ADAS controller in another. To solve the problem, Valens came up with the electronics visible here. It’s basically a way of implementing long-distance PCIe connections. In the demo, a Qualcomm ECU communicates over a PCIe bus to a 5G module as though the two controllers were sitting on the same backplane. In reality, they each talk to a Valens PCIe module. The Valens modules then talk to each at PCIe speeds. Surprisingly, the comm cable you see between the two Valens boards is just ordinary twisted pair, according to the booth personnel we talked to. Specifically, connections take place over a configurable physical layer supporting up to 16 Gbps symmetric bandwidth.