> The aspect of the problem not talked about is that a lot of automotive chips are really, really old.
> And they are old, because of many certification requirements set partially by the industry, and a few odd governments.
> In reality, most of them are both less reliable, and harder to work with in comparison to open market parts.
> The only two things I seen chips with micron scale nodes used in my life were: air conditioner boards, and car parts.
For example, who in the world today makes PMOS TTL chips? I bet the few foundries who can still do that will bill car parts makers an arm, and a leg for keeping making something this old
Want to migrate? Find somebody who can can translate hand-drawn TTL chip to moderately modern CMOS under 60 years old.
At times, the cases about I heard of car makers were having troubles with were also nothing less of direct consequence of conscious overengineering: some BWMs have one STM32 per window switch just to blink the LED, and do ADC despite the switch having just 5 positions. And now they can't ship because of this single LED blinker.
Window controls are safety regulated modules in modern vehicles. They detect the closing force and reverse direction off the required motor torque exceeds av threshold so that you can’t accidentally or intentionally choke someone with the windows. This feature is required by standards bodies and some regulators.
Why not put those smarts in one big module, say the Body Control Module which is always huge and already gets redesigned and uses more expensive, smaller feature chips anyway you ask? Well, we need to run a bunch of wires to the door, several for the switch, power and grind and Hall effect sensor for the motor and we need to account for the noise and power loss on the long wire run because as a safety feature the sensing has to be ASIL compliant to high fault tolerance. Turns out that that length of wire is several dollars more than putting the module in the door… These things are all done for a reason and the automotive engineers aren’t solely stuck in the old ways. They’re frequently penny pinched to death, but if you look at the constraints they’re doing their best.
> Window controls are safety regulated modules in modern vehicles. They detect the closing force and reverse direction off the required motor torque exceeds av threshold so that you can’t accidentally or intentionally choke someone with the windows. This feature is required by standards bodies and some regulators.
All of this is achieved with a single <$1 part, fixed torque clutch... But who in the world wants to intentionally choke somebody with a power window? This add to the long list of absurd product liability regulations in the spirit of one demanding "do not operate the appliance with your genitals" to be printed on every stove.
> A 1997 government study by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis estimated power windows sent nearly 500 people to emergency rooms in one year, and that half the victims were small children.
I remember watching A Faster Horse, a documentary on the Mustang. There was an interview with an accountant type at Ford who pointed out a three cent difference in part cost per car multiplied to millions of dollars at their scale. A $1 part might have given him a heart attack.
Seriously people need to watch Sandy Munro on YT. He literally went threw some calculations one the money you can save on removing a single fastner from the design.
He was a former chief engineer at Ford and had his own company for decades now. He also worked in Ford Global Finical Head Quarters.
When he sees some small board screwed down with to many screws he starts ranting.
> The aspect of the problem not talked about is that a lot of automotive chips are really, really old.
> And they are old, because of many certification requirements set partially by the industry, and a few odd governments.
> In reality, most of them are both less reliable, and harder to work with in comparison to open market parts.
> The only two things I seen chips with micron scale nodes used in my life were: air conditioner boards, and car parts.
For example, who in the world today makes PMOS TTL chips? I bet the few foundries who can still do that will bill car parts makers an arm, and a leg for keeping making something this old
Want to migrate? Find somebody who can can translate hand-drawn TTL chip to moderately modern CMOS under 60 years old.
At times, the cases about I heard of car makers were having troubles with were also nothing less of direct consequence of conscious overengineering: some BWMs have one STM32 per window switch just to blink the LED, and do ADC despite the switch having just 5 positions. And now they can't ship because of this single LED blinker.