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Consumer Electronics Daily News 3 7 Tuesday, January 8, 2019 Waterproof Electronics: A Fairy Tale? Once upon a time, it was commonly known that the only way your mobile phone could possibly survive being dropped in water was to immediately turn it off, remove the battery and then place the phone in a bowl of rice overnight to dry it out. Flash forward several years and "waterproof" phones are the new standard. How can a device with so many openings and fragile electrical compo- nents possibly be waterproof? Smartphone manufacturers use a variety of sealing techniques to make sure all potential points of least resist- ance are watertight. Sometimes sealing is as straight forward as strategically using glue in the connection ports or to secure the glass to the phone. Areas like the cable connectors may use rubber gaskets, while headphone jacks and charging ports use rubber rings to seal the enclosures. Smartphone buttons often have a silicon rubber boot to sepa- rate the button from the electrical con- tacts within the phone. On areas that need to keep water out but let air pass through, like microphones and speakers, manufacturers use a water-resistant breathable mesh fabric membrane to act as a pressure vent. Sometimes ports, like the charging port, can be protected from water electronically by being made of corrosion resistant metals and pro- grammed to automatically shut off when not in use. These seals all need to go through rigorous quality testing. The most impor- tant type of testing for the waterproofing process is leak testing. Waterproof smart- phone manufacturers have dozens of leak testers, like ATEQ's F28 lite, throughout their production lines to test the phone at various points during the assembly process. As each port is added to the phone, it can be leak tested with a differ- ential pressure decay leak tester. This technology pressurizes the part with compressed air and meas- ures the pressure drop, which would signify the air leak rate in that port. Once the phone is com- pletely assembled and the screen is secured, it can be leak tested with ATEQ's sealed compo- nent ingress leak testing method. By put- ting the completed sealed phone into an airtight chamber, the chamber can be pressurized with compressed air and the leak tester can measure if any air sinks into the phone. If a leak amount that is below the manufacturer-specified leak rate sinks in, the phone can be considered airtight enough to be classified as being "waterproof." So are waterproof phones really the fairy tale they seem to be? Depends on your fairy tale. There are limitations to the term "waterproof." Typically it means the phone can sur- vive droplets of water and being gently submerged in a few feet of fresh water for a decent amount of time. Degrees of waterproofness vary depending on pres- sure and corrosive chemicals. So while you can now confidently finish emails in the rain, listen to podcasts in the shower and release your fears of the previously- treacherous toilet drop, don't plan on tweeting while scuba diving deep in the salty ocean. For more information, visit booth #41370, go to www.atequsa.com, call 734.838.3100 or email leaktestsales@atequsa.com. Ambarella's Camera for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Ambarella, Inc., a leading developer of high-resolution video processing and com- puter vision semiconductors, introduced the CV22AQ automotive camera System-on- Chip (SoC), featuring the Ambarella CVflow computer vision architecture for powerful Deep Neural Network (DNN) processing. Target applications include front ADAS cameras, electronic mirrors with Blind Spot Detection (BSD), interior driver and cabin monitoring cameras and Around View Monitors (AVM) with park- ing assist. The new SoC provides the per- formance necessary to exceed New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) requirements for applications such as lane keeping, Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), intelligent headlight control and speed assis- tance functions. Fabricated in advanced 10nm process technology, its low power consumption supports the small form factor and thermal requirements of windshield- mounted forward ADAS cameras. About Ambarella Ambarella's products are used in a wide variety of human and computer vision applications, including surveillance, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), electronic mirror, drive recorder, driver/cabin monitoring, autonomous driving, and robotic applications. Ambarella's low-power and high-resolu- tion video compression, image process- ing, and deep neural network processors and software enable cameras to become more intelligent by extracting valuable data from high-resolution video streams. For more information, visit www.ambarella.com.