By Roy Singer, Director of Customer Support and Applications
We have just completed an intensive week of interoperability testing at the Suntrax test facility in the sunny city of Auburndale, Florida. The Plugfest event was organized and hosted by OmniAir, an organization promoting interoperability and certification for connected vehicles. OmniAir is participating in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) Next Generation Certification Program for Connected Vehicles.
The testing took place on the week of May 1, 2023, both in the lab and on the tracks. It was a wonderful platform for all participants to sync together, experience the technology in action, and get a feel of the benefits of V2X in real life.
Conformance was tested in all layers, from the LTE-V2X Radio, via the PC5 interface, the application layer and security stack, focusing on the U.S. profile. The tests covered onboard units as well as roadside units, many of which included Autotalks chipsets.
In this event, Autotalks continued its software partnership with Cohda Wireless for validating Cohda’s SW stack and applications running on Autotalks’ evaluation kit system. The Plugfest, once more, assured the full conformance and interoperability of this combination at the radio, application, and security layers. Both are mature products that have been in production for years.
One of the main goals of this partnership is pre-integrating Cohda’s SW targeted for Autotalks’ 3rd generation TEKTON3 chipset. That effort is ongoing, and the chip will be available to customers in the upcoming months. With the integrated software, TEKTON3 will provide a complete V2X solution that reduces the overall development and integration efforts and costs for OEMs and Tier1s. The main benefits are simplifying the security certification and functional safety of the entire V2X solution by providing a single optimized device from a single vendor.
At the end of the day, the Omniair consortium did a terrific job. It was truly amazing to see system manufacturers, SW providers, and test equipment vendors from the entire industry, some of which are competitors, working together to achieve interoperability and to show that V2X is ready to roll out. After all, we all have a common goal of saving lives.
