P3 Group’s automotive division is opening a new automotive-focused Mobility Innovation Center in the metro Detroit, Mich. area and plans to hire nearly 100 people this year to focus on research and development in advanced automotive technologies. The 25,000-square foot facility in Southfield, Mich. will focus on technology R&D as well as “organizational solutions and processes that will support OEMs and suppliers as they evolve their businesses … in the wake of the changes in the automotive industry ahead,” according to P3. It includes a 10-car vehicle workshop with prototyping capabilities and multiple labs.
P3 already has more then 120 automotive experts in Michigan. It said that about 60% of its new hires will be in southeast Michigan, and the other positions will be in other areas of North America. P3 is looking for systems and test engineers, telematics management and connectivity specialists, and mobility and cybersecurity experts for the new facility.
This is P3’s second recent expansion. In March, P3 Communications opened a new telecommunications services office in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in part to support mobile network operators with network testing and optimization as they prepare for the upcoming Olympics, but also to take advantage of overall telecom growth in the region.
Elektrobit is also expanding its R&D for the connected car. It is opening two new research centers for the connected car: one in Timisoara, Romania and another in Bangalore, India. The automotive systems company plans to hire about 80 deveopers who will focus on the technologies needed to implement autonomous driving vehicles, particularly software and systems as part of the Automotive Open System Architecture or AUTOSAR inititative.
In other test news:
-Both Keysight Technologies and National Instruments are putting focus on millimeter wave/E-Band systems for 5G. Keysight has a new reference solution for analysis of millimeter wave frequencies between 60-90 GHz, and NI announced this week that it has developed the first millimeter wave software-defined radio with a transceiver that can receive wideband signals with 2 GHz of real-time bandwidth at 71-76 GHz.
“Engineers and scientists have used SDRs ubiquitously in the spectrum below 6 GHz for years,” NI said in announcing the new radio. “However, with companies investing in mmWave as a potential core technology for 5G, researchers now have a full-featured SDR platform to drive initiatives based on this technology.”
–Anite has released a new software update for its Nemo Handy system that enables forcing features on Samsung devices that utilize the Shannon chipset, primarily the Galaxy Note 5 and S6 Edge. This lets engineers use features such as cell locking, system locking for GSM, WCDMA and LTE and frequency band locking to control how the device attaches in order to test specific configurations and network conditions.
The University Institute of Technology Nancy-Brambois in France will be using Anite’s SAS network simulator for students in its network and telecommunications program, to support protocol signalling research in education.
–ETSI’s industry specific group on mobile edge computing has released three specification documents as part of its work toward fashioning a unified approach to mobile edge computing. It starts out with defining terms related to MEC (pdf), specifies technical requirements for interoperability and deployment (pdf), and provides a document with a framework and reference architecture for MEC in a mobile network (pdf).
-The Home Gateway Initiative has also passed some of its existing specifications to ETSI to be adopted as part of ETSI’s SmartM2M technical committee, from which point ETSI will handle their development as part of its larger work in M2M. The three standards that HGI developed pertain to its work making the home gateway a modular applications platform and include platform requirements; smart home architectures and requirements for wireless home area networks.
–AT4 Wireless and OctoScope have launched a new system that can be used to LTE in unlicensed and Wi-Fi coexistence. The system integrates OctoScope’s programmable attenuator with control from AT4 Wireless’ testing platform. The test solution includes an automated test suite for Below Energy Detect Wi-FI and LTE-U coexistence; coexistence between the two technologies at low Wi-Fi power levels is one of the central points of contention over LTE-U, because it raises the question of how much Wi-Fi traffic will actually be protected by LTE-U coexistence mechanisms.
-Drone company MicroPilot will be using Spirent Communications’ global navigation satellite system (GNSS) simulator to ensure that positioning information is correct for its unmanned aerial systems.
–GL Communications has launched new physical layer monitoring for T1 and E1 environments. The web-based applications for monitoring and diagnostics utilizing call detail records (CDRs) for purporses such as fraud detection, real-time signaling monitoring and revenue and billing verification, among others.
