Chasing Reliability In Automotive Electronics 

January 15th,  2019 – By Susan Rambo and Ed Sperling

Supply chain changes, resistance to sharing data and technology unknowns add up to continued uncertainty.

“Traditional semiconductor vendors who are making or designing chips to enable autonomous driving applications are nowadays sometimes competing with Tier-1 electronics system designers and OEMs, who may be making their own chips or providing explicit requirements to their semiconductor vendor partners. Additionally, new entrants like Uber, Way and Apple are designing their own complete systems, despite their relative lack of experience in the automotive industry. ISO 26262 mandates high levels of collaboration and information sharing throughout the value chain that may be unfamiliar to new entrants.”

The ISO 26262 standard is snapshot of issues and the lengths the whole supply chain has to go. Collaboration is key. Communication is part of the safety standards up and down the automotive safety critical supply chain now. It’s built into the standards.

Sharing knowledge of a supplier’s crown jewels—intellectual property—has to happen among suppliers and auto OEMs. “Participants in the semiconductor and software supply chains are usually secretive about how their IP was developed and how it works in detail,” said Shuler. Suppliers should remember that the “your customer still has an obligation to confirm your compliance with ISO 26262.”

To learn more, please download this technical paper, Fundamentals of Semiconductor ISO 26262 Certification: People, Process and Product.

To see the entire on the SemiEngineering page, please click here: https://semiengineering.com/chasing-reliability-in-automotive-electronics/