As the number of electronic control units (ECUs) or sensors connected to a controller area network (CAN) bus increases, so does the bus load. When a CAN bus is overloaded by a large number of ECUs, both the waiting time and the error probability of the data transmission are increased. Because the duration of the data transmission is proportional to the frame length, it is desirable to reduce the CAN frame length. In this paper, we present an improved CAN data-reduction (DR) algorithm to reduce the amount of data to be transferred in the CAN frame length. We also implement the data reduction algorithm using the CANoe software, and measure the CAN bus load using a CANcaseXL device. Experimental results with a Kia Sorento vehicle indicate that we can obtain additional average compression ratio of 11.15% with the proposed method compared with the ECANDC algorithm. By using the CANoe software, we show that the average message delay is within 0.10ms and the bus load can be reduced by 23.45% with 20 ECUs using the proposed method compared with the uncompressed message.

A press-fit connection is a solderless electrical connection technology, which utilizes the mechanical contact force generated between through-holes on a printed circuit board (PCB) and terminals with a width slightly larger than the through-hole diameter. This technology has been widely noted recently as a measure against the "Lead Free Requirement" of materials comprising electric/electronic devices, especially in the area of automobile connector. For the application of this technology to automobile connectors, we have to take into account the severe requirement, such as (1) the adaptation to wider through-hole diameter tolerance range and (2) the establishment of connection reliability for the various PCB surface treatments. As a result, we have determined the minimum and maximum contact forces satisfying the long term connection reliability and designed the terminal shape, which has been refined the N-shape cross section developed before, by using three dimensional finite element methods (FEM). Furthermore, we have developed a new type of hard tin plating on terminals, thus preventing the scraping-off of tin during the insertion process, that could result in a short-circuit on the PCB, for the Organic Solderability Preservative (OSP) treated PCB. The press-fit connector for the automobile airbag Electronic Control Units (ECUs) we developed has been able to transfer to the mass-production phase successfully from August 2005.

Optical switching networks to transport vast amounts of information are important for B-ISDN services. The wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is emerging as the dominant technology for future optical networks. This paper proposes a large capacity photonic ATM switch architecture using WDM technology. The switch consists of two stages. The first stage is a space switch and the second stage is a wavelength switch. The proposed switch is suitable for WDM optical ATM networks, that is, an input and an output of the switch are wavelength-division-multiplexed. The switch can provide very large ATM cell switching capacity, for instance, 10Tbit/s, with reasonable complexity. The main switch module of the proposed switch has a simple architecture, and reduces the amount of a buffer hardware by introducing the WDM concept.