I hope it isn't a surprise to anyone reading this blog that the share of a vehicle's cost that goes to electronics is increasing rapidly. I expect most readers participate in some way in the ecosystem that supplies the electronics, most of which is semiconductor. The amount of electronics in a vehicle has been increasing for a decade or more, but the arrival of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and the move towards autonomous vehicles (Audi calls this "piloted driving") has accelerated it. ADAS requires vision processing and high-speed networking, which is far more complex than the electronic control units (ECUs) of old that were often a small microcontroller built in a mature process and connected to a (comparatively) slow CAN bus. The share is predicted to reach 50% by 2030, up from around 30% today. At the imec Technology Forum in May, Berthold Hellenthal of Audi gave his view of the challenges in automotive electronics. He is head of Audi's Competence Center for Electronics and Semiconductor. He pointed out that the 50% number above is not even the most interesting. He estimates that 80% of all the innovation that will occur in vehicles in the next couple of decades will be in semiconductors. Although "only" 100M vehicles are built each year, the semiconductor content in each one means that this is a large market and growing fast. On top of that, the number of lines of code in a vehicle is also growing explosively. The innovation doesn't just occur in the cars themselves, but also in the plants where they are built (Audi has about 100 around the world). One big change that he forecast is that the usage of cars will change dramatically. Today, we own our own vehicles and most cars are used for about 1½ hours per day and the car lasts for 15 years. There are obviously exceptions like taxis. In the future, with piloted driving, most of us will not own our own vehicle and so all cars will be more like taxis, used for about 22½ hours per day for 15 years. So the lifetime use of a car will go from 8000 hours to 121,500 hours. It will also have a major effect on the overall market for vehicles. With autonomous cars, we may end up driving more, since we can do other things at the same time, but if we make the simplest assumption that we drive the same amount as before, but in a shared vehicle, then the number of cars required could drop by 80%. Presumably there will still be peak periods when a lot of us want to use a car at the same time, and others where there are a lot of idle vehicles (not many of us will want to use a car at 4am even if we don't have to drive it). That means that the 22½ hour number that Berthold forecast seems high to me since so many vehicles will be idle from, say, 11pm to 7am every night. This has major implications for reliability. There are a number of ways to deal with this from fail-safe operation, adding redundancy and treating failure as "just" another use case. As I wrote here in Do You Know What a FIT is? we need to get the rate of failure of a semiconductor-based subsystem down to about 0.1 failure per billion hours of operation, when the inherent reliability of the semiconductor process is more like 500 failures per billion hours of operation. In the past, vehicle manufacturers (like Audi) partnered with so-called Tier 1s (like Bosch or Delphi). Going forward, that becomes a triangle, adding the semiconductor manufacturer as a first-class citizen. Audi has a process that they call the Audi Progressive SemiConductor Program (PSCP) that involves their own R&D along with the semiconductor companies' R&D to deliver reliable functionality to their customers. Cars are not like, say, smartphones. They need to deliver reliability under extreme temperature ranges, high humidity, unstable voltage, and harmful chemicals and gases. They need to be as close to zero defect as possible, since in the most serious cases they don't want to harm anybody, and in less serious cases they want to avoid recall and warranty costs. Plus, they need a reliable and long-term supply so that they can replace parts a decade after the car was manufactured, for example. As Berthold put it when he wrapped up: Audi will "drive" semiconductors. And your dog will drive your car... (Please visit the site to view this video) Previous: Provisioning Devices Securely![]()
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