5 ms·

I'm not following you how on that would be a positive (in a chip shortage situation). Say you use 50 microcontrollers in a car. Probably 15+ separate part numb

by tpmx 5y ago

I'm not following you how on that would be a positive (in a chip shortage situation). Say you use 50 microcontrollers in a car. Probably 15+ separate part numbers? One or two of those can't be acquired, so boards need to be redesigned and the production line is held up. Now, imagine a different world with wide cross-licensing between manufacturers and instead of doing hundreds of separate variants slighly cost optimized for various purposes for each major microcontroller design, let's just have a small number of kitchen sink variants.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
It's a trade-off though, since every one of those controllers will probably be less efficient and more power hungry then more specific parts would have been
- tpmx 5y ago
  I agree that it's a tradeoff, but not in power efficency. It's easy to shut off parts that are not being used. It's primarily a tradeoff between a) increased chip size, b) number of external chip connections, c) cost, d) probability that having a small number of footprints/designs will help. So, in short: cost vs winnings from having a lean library of component.
YZF 5y ago
If you're one car company or building one car design you try to minimize the number of different components in your design. However, different cars companies might (and do) choose different MCUs based on their architecture requirements. Some car vendors use CAN bus, so they'd pick a microcontroller with CAN. Some use Ethernet. They have tools and software the generally is build for certain families. An ECU is not going to have the same CPU as the radio or the entertainment system, it just doesn't make sense. The diversity should mean that when Audi picked some specific microcontroller for their ECU there's not too many others that are using the same part at volume. So this should isolate them to some degree from fluctuation in demand. If there's only one vendor/part, like we're seeing with GPUs, then nobody can get any, period. Even if Audi can't get their CPU for some reason then GM who uses a different CPU might be able to get it. Well, unless it's the same factor and the fabrication is the bottleneck...

by tpmx 5y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

It's a trade-off though, since every one of those controllers will probably be less efficient and more power hungry then more specific parts would have been

tpmx 5y ago
I agree that it's a tradeoff, but not in power efficency. It's easy to shut off parts that are not being used. It's primarily a tradeoff between a) increased chip size, b) number of external chip connections, c) cost, d) probability that having a small number of footprints/designs will help. So, in short: cost vs winnings from having a lean library of component.

YZF 5y ago

If you're one car company or building one car design you try to minimize the number of different components in your design. However, different cars companies might (and do) choose different MCUs based on their architecture requirements. Some car vendors use CAN bus, so they'd pick a microcontroller with CAN. Some use Ethernet. They have tools and software the generally is build for certain families. An ECU is not going to have the same CPU as the radio or the entertainment system, it just doesn't make sense. The diversity should mean that when Audi picked some specific microcontroller for their ECU there's not too many others that are using the same part at volume. So this should isolate them to some degree from fluctuation in demand. If there's only one vendor/part, like we're seeing with GPUs, then nobody can get any, period. Even if Audi can't get their CPU for some reason then GM who uses a different CPU might be able to get it. Well, unless it's the same factor and the fabrication is the bottleneck...