Boyd: Pioneering Sealing and Shielding Solutions for AI Data Centers

For over 70 years, Boyd has provided sealing solutions for data center applications, including those shaping the future of AI. We leverage our deep material expertise to design and fabricate resilient gaskets and seals tailored to your enterprise needs. Our gaskets create tight seals around server doors, equipment enclosures, and input/output ports to waterproof and prevent dust and moisture contamination. Our EMI shielding materials block unwanted electromagnetic waves to ensure optimal system functionality and data integrity. Boyd’s gasket and O-ring solutions reduce wear and tear, protecting against contamination or water damage. Gaskets, air baffles, and air blockers boost the efficiency of AI systems that leverage extreme air cooling.

Bonding the Future: Secure Connections with Boyd

Quiet Your Data Center: Boyd’s Noise and Vibration Control

Boyd’s Noise, Vibration, and Harshness (NVH) solutions dampen the roar in server rooms. We strategically place our vibration damping materials on server chassis and equipment racks to significantly reduce noise and vibration levels. We also specialize in hard disk drive (HDD) dampeners to improve read-write reliability. These innovative materials absorb and dissipate energy, creating a quieter and more stable environment for AI infrastructure, protecting the equipment, and minimizing the risk of data loss due to vibration. Additionally, our acoustic insulation materials, such as SOLIMIDE® foam, further enhance noise reduction.

Boyd: Building a Stronger Foundation for Data Centers and AI

Boyd pioneers and manufactures Engineered Material solutions with decades of material science experience and expertise. We fortify AI infrastructure within data centers through a proactive approach to engineering sealing, insulation, shielding, technologies. Deploying these advanced solutions enhances the reliability, performance, and longevity of AI systems and data centers, ensuring seamless operations and unlocking new possibilities in technology-driven innovation.

With Boyd’s expertise at their disposal, data centers confidently navigate the evolving landscape of AI to harness its full potential for transformative growth and success. To learn more about our engineered material solutions or to discuss your project needs, schedule a consultation with our experts.

Navigating Autonomous Safety: Understanding Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)

In an era where technology seamlessly intertwines with daily life, advancements in automotive safety have revolutionized the industry. Among these innovations, ADAS, an acronym increasingly prominent in discussions surrounding road safety, plays a pivotal role.

How does ADAS work?

ADAS utilizes hardware and software to analyze the vehicle’s surroundings and provide immediate assistance. Sensors and cameras gather data on the environment, road conditions, and nearby objects., ADAS systems process this data using algorithms to identify hazards, monitor lane markings, detect pedestrians, and assess the vehicle’s position. Through the Human-Machine Interface (HMI), ADAS alerts the driver to potential dangers, lane deviations, or collision risks. Using this data, ADAS adjusts the vehicle’s speed with adaptive cruise control, issues alerts with lane departure warnings, applies brakes automatically with automatic emergency braking, and warns of vehicles in blind spots with blind spot detection.

Why Is ADAS Important?

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) play a critical role to enhance road safety. According to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, currently available Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) technologies hold the potential to prevent approximately 40% of crashes, mitigate 37% of injuries, and avert 29% of fatalities over the next 30 years. Human drivers, by nature, have limitations. Our reaction times are not instantaneous, and our attention can wane due to fatigue, distractions like sneezing, or other moments of inattention. During these critical moments, ADAS intervenes, offering a dependable and swifter emergency response compared to what a human driver could achieve alone, resulting in fewer accidents and potentially saving lives.

What ADAS Systems Are There?

ADAS systems offer diverse functionalities to enhance vehicle safety, comfort, and convenience through automation. Notable examples like adaptive cruise control (ACC), adaptive light control, automatic parking, autonomous valet parking, glare-free high beam and pixel light, and navigation systems each target distinct driving needs, such as maintaining safe distances, improving visibility, and enabling autonomous operation.

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC)

Adaptive cruise control employs sensors to detect the vehicle in front and automatically adjusts speed to maintain a safe following distance. ACC is a more advanced iteration of traditional cruise control, which maintains a set speed, regardless of surroundings. This feature reduces driver fatigue during extended journeys and aids in preventing rear-end collisions.

Adaptive Light Control

Adaptive light control systems anticipate the road ahead by utilizing cameras or GPS data to adjust the headlight angle accordingly. This proactive adjustment effectively illuminates curves and bends, enhancing safety during nighttime driving experiences.

Automatic Parking

Automatic parking systems, equipped with sensors and cameras, identify a suitable parking space then take control of the steering wheel to guide the vehicle into the space, allowing the driver to manage acceleration and brake pedals. More advanced automatic parking system versions will also control speed, making parking a fully automated process.

Autonomous Valet Parking 

Autonomous valet parking (AVP) enables drivers to drop off their car at a designated zone within a compatible parking facility. The car then utilizes advanced sensors and software to navigate the environment and park itself without any human input.

Glare-Free High Beam and Pixel Light

Glare-free high beam and pixel light systems utilize cameras to detect other vehicles and automatically adjust the area lit by the headlights. Glare-free systems project a high beam around the detected vehicles but not on them, ensuring good visibility for the driver without blinding others.

Navigation System

Navigation systems actively provide drivers with real-time traffic updates, suggest alternative routes in case of congestion, and guide them to their destination. This functionality reduces driver distraction enabling them to navigate unfamiliar roads more confidently.

The Future of ADAS

Advanced Driver Assistance System development is fueled by revolutionary advancements in technology. Breakthroughs in sensor technology, smaller cameras, artificial intelligence, and data connectivity are reshaping ADAS system capabilities. Advanced sensors like LiDAR and radar are gaining precision and affordability, bolstering ADAS systems’ capacity to detect and respond to potential hazards with heightened accuracy.

Evolving AI algorithms process complex data at lightning speeds which enables ADAS to make instantaneous decisions, augmenting safety and efficiency. Integrating connectivity technologies, such as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, further enriches ADAS capabilities by facilitating critical information real-time exchange among vehicles which leads to more synchronized and proactive responses to road conditions. As these technologies continue to develop, the future of ADAS promises a driving experience that’s not only safer and more autonomous, but also seamlessly integrated with its surroundings.

Boyd: Beyond Cooling – Sealing and Protecting ADAS Systems

Innovate with Boyd

Our engineered material solutions effectively seal sensors and electronics from environmental hazards and mitigate shock and vibration impact on the longevity and reliability of these systems. From advanced bonding solutions to custom elastomeric gaskets and foam solutions, Boyd protects and extends the lifetime and reliability of the ADAS system you’ve painstakingly designed. To learn more about our advanced engineering solutions or to discuss your project needs, schedule a consultation with our experts.

Test Your Knowledge!

The Buzz Around Artificial Intelligence

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly powerful and sophisticated, organizations worldwide recognize the transformative potential of AI in driving market growth and gaining a competitive edge. Major advances in AI technology have lowered the entry barrier for businesses to invest in AI research and development, fueling widespread adoption of AI across industries.

North America, home to several leading tech giants such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Apple, has garnered the largest AI market share in 2022.

The AI Global Survey by McKinsey & Company reports that 50% of organizations have implemented at least one AI capability in their business processes. Increasing AI implementation opens new possibilities for innovation and growth across various industries, such as transportation, healthcare, education, entertainment, and many others.

For example, Google has already implemented generative AI with Smart Reply and Smart Compose to help users save time and effort in writing emails, which completed over 180 billion suggestions in 2022. In May 2023, Google I/O announced several new AI-powered features to its products, including Help Me Write for Gmail that generates complete emails with a prompt, Immersive View for Google Maps that provides a 360-degree view of a location, Magic Eraser in Google Photos that helps users edit photos easily, and Google Bard, a conversational generative AI chatbot that helps users write, research and learn. Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Photos each have 2 billion users that are leveraging these generative AI tools.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is another powerful AI tool that acquired 1 million users in just 5 days after launching in November 2022. By comparison, it took Instagram approximately 2.5 months to reach 1 million downloads. Whereas Netflix had to wait around 3.5 years to reach 1 million users.

The ChatGPT AI chatbot has a wide range of applications, including customer support, virtual assistants, creative writing, and brainstorming. Currently with more than 100 million users, ChatGPT generates more than 1.8 billion visitors per month.

As technology continues to evolve, more companies leverage AI to improve existing offerings and generate new solutions that accelerate value creation for their customers. Each new generative AI application has the potential for drastic user growth.

Additional Hardware Required for Generative AI

Boyd: Sealing, Shielding and Insulating Generative Artificial Intelligence

Boyd has decades of experience and expertise in designing and manufacturing advanced solutions that support Artificial Intelligence applications for various industries, including eMobility, cloud, medical and more. Leverage our material science heritage to design innovative AI-based solutions optimized for performance, reliability, and energy efficiency.

Our engineering and material science expertise allows us to design tailored solutions for specific applications, whether it is an optical adhesives in LiDAR sensors for autonomous vehicles, or medical equipment. To learn more about our solutions or to discuss your project needs, schedule a consultation with our experts.

In a recent blog post, we discussed what optical encoders are and how they are used. An optical encoder is an electro-mechanical component for measuring position, velocity, and acceleration. Boyd’s optical encoder components have been used for years in printers, scanners, medical equipment, and much more. Lately, our optical encoders have found an exciting new application as a vital component in LiDAR (light detection and ranging) sensors for autonomous vehicles in the eMobility industry.

What is a LiDAR Sensor?

How Do Optical Encoders Make This Possible?