If you plan to attend the SAE World Congress

…http://www.sae.org/congress/ April 16-18 at Detroit’s Cobo Center I hope you’ll block out time for the session I’m coordinating, Automotive Electronics Design and Systems Reliability, at 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, April 18, in room D0-07B.

This is the first time I’ve coordinated an SAE session or, for that matter, done anything at Convergence or an SAE World Congress other than interview exhibitors to learn more about automotive electronics technology.

The invitation to participate more directly resulted from a book I wrote, “Automotive E/E Reliability – Strategies for Keeping Pace in a Feature-Rich World,” published by the SAE. Papers had already been submitted by the time I got involved, and my only regret was not joining the session-planning team earlier. Volunteering to coordinate next year’s session on automotive electronics reliability should fix that.

I hope to see you on April 18. In the meantime, if you are involved in automotive electronics reliability, please consider submitting a paper for next year’s event.

Five papers will be presented on April 18:

• “Effective Voltage Sag Ride Through Using Ultracapacitor for Armored Fighting Vehicle Application – A case study,” presented by Prabhavathy Rajappan, from the Government of India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO);
• “Robustness Testing of Real-Time Automotive Systems Using Sequence Covering Arrays,” presented by Gunwant Dhadyalla, a principal engineer at the University of Warwick;
• “Technical Challenges in Implementing New Electrical Features on Existing Vehicle Architecture,” presented by Ajinkya Chinchwadkar from GM’s Technical Center in India;
• “Adaptive Test System to Improve PCB Testing in the Automotive Industry,” presented by Heinz-Dietrich Wuttke from Ilmenau University of Technology, and
• “Robustness Modeling of Complex Systems – Application to the Initialisation of a Hybrid Electric Vehicle Propulsion System,” presented by Ross McMurran, Senior Manager, Hybrid Controls, Systems & Attributes at Jaguar Land-Rover.

Two written papers were contributed to the session:

• “Manufacturing Support Design for Low-Cost Instrument Clusters,” by Sreedhar Thanthry, Systems Engineer, Diesel Electronics at Delphi Diesel Systems, and
• “Impact of Electrical Transients on Functional Safety – A Special Case of Electrification of Conventional Vehicle Platforms,” by Sreegururaj Jayachander, a manager at Mahindra & Mahindra, Ltd.