Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan released a new report examining the impact of autonomous and electric vehicles on the test and measurement market, and found that if solutions offered by pure-play test and measurement OEMs and third-party testing and certification service providers are combined, it estimates that the global autonomous car and EV T&M market will generate revenues of $1.6 billion by 2025, up from $1.2 billion last year. Advanced Driver Assistance System testing is expected to see the fastest growth, driven by the extensive testing of electronic control units (ECUs) and domain control units (DCUs) that needs to occur. Frost & Sullivan also said that test vendors will need to provide expertise in areas such as millimeter wave testing for automotive use cases on 5G networks — and testing for Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) for automotive.
“There is a significant degree of overlap between infotainment, ADAS, and vehicle-to-everything (V2X); this overlap will increase as vehicle autonomy continues to grow, which will require testing methodologies such as hardware-in-the-loop (HIL),” said Rohan Joy Thomas, industrial research analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “HIL simulates real-world traffic in the lab environment and validates the performance of software embedded inside the ECUs and DCUs against the stimuli.”
Thomas went on to add that “testing vendors and OEMs must collaborate to build testing platforms that are customized to the requirements of the particular OEMs” and said they must also “focus on engineering testing equipment that can test cloud- and 5G-based autonomous car technologies.”
In related news, global test lab company Bureau Veritas said that its recently opened automotive testing lab in the Detroit area received ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation by the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation. The 23,000 square-foot lab and office facility conducts radio frequency, V2X and electromagnetic compatibility testing for automotive OEMs and Tier 1 and 2 suppliers.
Bureau Veritas also recently reported results for the first quarter of 2020. In its consumer products segment, which includes electrical and electronics testing, the company reported “very weak performances for electrical automotive and slightly better for mobile testing.” This was mostly due to the COVID-19 related shutdowns as well as “difficult trading conditions with large U.S. retailers,” BV said. However, it added that now, its 5G test platforms in China and South Korea are operations and are expected to support gradual growth. Its labs are all up and running and all employees are back to work in China, the company added, but its activity in Southeast Asia overall “is likely to be impacted by the multiplication of lockdown situations.”
In other test news:
–Keysight Technologies says it is the first to win approval from 3GPP for 5G New Radio protocol test cases that support carrier aggregation. The test cases, which use Keysight’s Protocol Conformance Toolset, were submitted to the organization in March and verified by the RAN 5 working group. Keysight said that the test cases include the use of CA in 5G NR in both Nonstandalone and Standalone modes, across both millimeter wave and sub-6 GHz frequencies.
Keysight also this week opened a new lab in Malaysia that will conduct electronics EMC testing across a variety of verticals, from wireless communications and industrial IoT, to automotive and medical applications. The facility in Penang, Malaysia is similar to testing facilities that Keysight has in California and Germany.
-Engineering and testing company PCTest, which was acquired in January by Element Materials Technology Group, announced this week that it is investing in 5G test and certification equipment that will be available at its facilities in Columbia, Maryland and San Jose, California, as well as its lab in Korea. Purchases have included Rohde & Schwarz’s R&S TS8980 RF conformance test system, plus its R&S ATS1800C over-the-air test chamber, and Anritsu’s 5G NR Mobile Device Test Platform ME7834NR and New Radio RF Conformance Test System ME7873NR.
–Ookla Speedtest continues to track the impacts of the pandemic on internet speeds around the world after they saw a major slowdown in mid-March as a result of COVID-19 impacts. This week, the company found that while overall performance on a global basis didn’t see a significant change, fluctuations were sometimes still apparent at a national level. In the U.S., however, speeds continued to hold steady: fixed network speeds were down 2% from last week, while mobile network performance was 2% faster than last week.
