How Embedded Storage Emends Transportation

By Embedded Advisor | Tuesday, February 25, 2020

The use of embedded storage has now forayed into the transportation industry, adding better visibility and transparency into the operational ecosystem.

FREMONT, CA: With a surge in human population and industrial application, the need to develop an intelligent transportation system is becoming a necessity. An intelligent transportation system can deliver flexible, reliable, and enhanced performance that can boost supply chain capabilities. The role of embedded systems becomes crucial in this context. The transportation-focused, data-intensive embedded systems will offer a broad range of operations such as data collection, storage, in-vehicle computing, video surveillance, and equipment monitoring capabilities. Such systems often have to operate amidst constant shock, vibration, and extreme environmental conditions. According to Embedded.com, an intelligent transportation system needs industrial-grade, high-endurance solid-state drives (SSDs) that can securely store the vehicle data.

Modern embedded SSDs must be designed to address these challenges. An advanced SSD will feature factors and interfaces that are suitable for extreme industrial applications. Such drives can tolerate vibration of up to 20 Gs and shock as great as 3,000 Gs. The drives must also be equipped with power-fail protection as well as other durability options such as ruggedized conformal coating. An advanced storage device will also support the functionality in temperatures ranging from -45°C and 85°C.

The data from the embedded storage systems are useful only when they are protected as well as retrievable when needed. Further, the devices also need to offer protection against vulnerabilities and cyberattacks. Security features such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) can enable the embedded storage devices to ensure data protection as well as ready accessibility. Moreover, advanced authentication and other access-protection features like secure ease and write protection can help to aid a multi-layered security strategy for key data and systems. In this way, embedded storage devices containing critical transportation data will not be of much importance even if they get into the wrong hands.

The massive amounts of transportation data can be leveraged with the aid of an embedded storage solution. With advancements in technology, storage devices will be able to cover a larger aspect of transportation data, thereby contributing to an intelligent transport system.