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Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

186 points by lambdasquirrel 5y ago

AbbeSomething 5y ago
Is a part of the problem that the chips they are depending on are so trivial and small that you would end up losing more when cutting it up on a smaller process? I guess there is a limit to how many chips you could put on a single wafer even if the chip was only a single gate? Maybe the old nodes are efficient enough for the chips they need. Then again it would make sense to update designs frequently enough to stay at nodes that have plenty of capacity, perhaps every 5 or 10 years or so?
- coryrc 5y ago
  Capital costs of a fab are the single highest cost of producing chips. So long as the fab is running it's cheap to keep running so little reason to spend money to put cheap things on other processes (which is an expensive design cost) when you can later switch to a more complex chip (which should allow you to reduce supporting components too) which takes advantage of the new process size.
anaganisk 5y ago
When a Power PC is perfectly capable for a MARS rover missions, I dont see any reason why they must run Snapdragons. Unless some evil company, starts ditching physical controls or starts shoving Ads into Speedometer. And everyone follows. Im thankful that automobile tech didn’t discover electron yet. Imagine your speedometer consuming 200mb of ram.
- willhinsa 5y ago
  Don't give them ideas!
  - ericbarrett 5y ago
    Too late: https://gizmodo.com/get-ready-for-in-car-ads-1846888390 https://gizmodo.com/get-ready-for-in-car-ads-1846888390
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- baybal2 5y ago
  > Im thankful that automobile tech didn’t discover electron yet. Too late. I am well aware of a few car dashboard clients using it to their own detriment (imaging gluing CanBus I/O to electron.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sircastor 5y ago
  Speaking from experience, I can tell you automakers are already shipping vehicles that some Infotainment apps are web technologies. Not electron, but a similar system to run an encapsulated web page. I’m doubtful of the cluster being run by a browser engine though.
  - joezydeco 5y ago
    Mazda has been using Opera running JS for their infotainment since 2014...
baybal2 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28709481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28709481 > 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.
- wcunning 5y ago
  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.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    > 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.
lucidguppy 5y ago
This feels like lack of planning. The semiconductor industry was a known entity for many years before this level of integration came to vehicles. They should have known this would happen. Ultimately the industry will have to maintain their own production for consistent silicon.
- dboreham 5y ago
  As mentioned above there are folks who's entire job is maintaining the spreadsheet for said plan.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    And you have to witness the mess without these people, or if they aren't allowed to do their job, in order to believe it. Better even, live the mess, I can assure you it is quite an experience.
- jes 5y ago
  > This feels like a lack of planning. In any complex undertaking, how can we know when enough planning has been done?
- P24L 5y ago
  These “low-tech” fabs are e.g. in Malaysia and they are often closed due to Covid..
- coryrc 5y ago
  Texas power outages took down one of the few major US plants and a random fire took down another, at the same time as a global pandemic. We're almost at the level of "imports banned from China"-levels of implausibility here. Sometimes shit happens.
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
I look forward to the cyber-punkish future (real soon now?) where there's an old beige computer case with a Pentium MMX sticker on it on someone's passenger seat with wires snaking into the engine bay. "Yeah the ECU died, so I had to hack together this replacement...".
- tyingq 5y ago
  There are cars where the enthusiast scene burns their own ECU EEPROMS to compensate air:fuel calculations after installing larger injectors, better flowing intakes, etc. Edit: There's also some "universal ECUs" from companies like Haltech. They sell a single ECU plus some adapter cables to make that single ECU run on a broad variety of cars from the 90's. Possible since the 90's cars all have the same rough types/numbers of sensors. Switchable software does the rest. I imagine this doesn't work past some year of make as the cars got more complex.
  - _0ffh 5y ago
    Yeah, but I think those enthusiasts are mostly just fixing up calibration values, not changing the actual control software.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      It is more than just a few values, it's maps to plot a curve. But they do actual control software too, though that's less common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaSquirt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaSquirt
      - _0ffh 5y ago
        Well I never wrote "just a few", but I did write "mostly". Also, disclosure: I'm intimately familiar with the ECU software of a major player in the industry, though primarily the part that governs the air system. It's surprisingly sophisticated and extremely configurable just by fiddling with those calibration values.
    - 5y ago
schiffern 5y ago
> “We were able to substitute alternative chips, and then write the firmware in a matter of weeks,” Musk said. “It’s not just a matter of swapping out a chip; you also have to rewrite the software.” https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22595060/tesla-chip-shortage-software-rewriting-ev-processor https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22595060/tesla-chip-short...
- baybal2 5y ago
  ARM M family cores can run each other's code more or less. Only the libraries for I/O need to be rewritten. In some cases, there are drop in replacements (Gigadevices STM32 clones)
  - im_down_w_otp 5y ago
    Are there even any ARM Cortex-M chips that are ASIL-B rated or better?
    - detaro 5y ago
      yes. ARM sells appropriate designs, and e.g. NXP offers some chips.
    - TaylorPhebillo 5y ago
      I think the Cortex-R chips are more targeted here- I think the V8-R chips are designed specifically for automotive use, so I assume they have appropriate ratings.
      - baybal2 5y ago
        There are very lazy car companies which simply specify "automotive certified" car chips for everything, including MCUs running window switches. So, don't be surprised $20 ARM-R based MCUs being used to do something trivial like driving window motor. I seen a few dashboard where there is an STM32 sitting connected to a single button, whose only duty is to register a key press, and burp something on the CanBus in response.
dboreham 5y ago
Admittedly it was a long time ago, but I worked in the semi industry and this isn't how things were done. We manufactured batches of totally obsolete EOLed devices for various customers when they had sufficient volume. Devices that are in volume production (e.g. for cars) are carefully managed by people who do nothing but ensure that they're available in the right place at the right time in the right volume. In order to not have product available to meet demand either a factory has to go on fire, or the customer has to screw up their forecast.
- baybal2 5y ago
  What an irony. Car makers with their volumes can buy decades worth of these STM32s for the price of a single car...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jnsaff2 5y ago
    Come on, let's say they get the STM32 for a quarter for a really high volume. There are tens if not hundreds of them in a car. 25k car would give you 100k stm32. 1k-10k cars is hardly decades.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      And that’s just one component.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  The customers screwed up the forecast. That's a huge part of the problem. They assumed the pandemic would kill demand and cancelled orders, but it didn't, and the cancelled capacity was already sold to someone else.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    As I understand it, there's also the case that you can't just move from one fab to another of the same process size at will. There's different setup/software/procedures, so the capacity isn't instantly interchangeable. There may even be fabs with excess capacity, but no "ready" customers.
DarkmSparks 5y ago
Really well written investigative piece. Its so often forgotten that safety critical hardware like a car ecu dances to a different rhythm than consumer electronics that just has to not explode in your pocket..
fidesomnes 5y ago
Just like how they can't build electric vehicles 10 years ago. Yeah sure. The automotive industry is run on room temperature IQ's.
adamrmcd 5y ago
I'd love to see Ken Sherrif do a teardown of some vintage ECM. https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/when-did-cars-get-computerized-264028 https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/when-did-cars-get-comput... (tldr) > So instead of one clear answer, we have three possibilities: 1957 Rambler, 1958 Chrysler or 1968 Volkswagen.
- rasz 5y ago
  Early electronic fuel injection was pretty shit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetronic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetronic No throttle control, cold start compensation with a bimetal strip + heater coil controlling extra air flap. Sensors were super primitive or omitted altogether (no temp sensors), air was measured with turbines restricting flow, no lambda, etc etc. Crazy Honda fact: all their ECUs from 1992 (P05) onward had full facility to drive individual coil on plug, but officially Honda switched away from mechanical distributor in 1999 (S2000?). You can trivially convert 92 car with a small adapter board, ECUs shipped with all the needed firmware and hardware in place sitting unused for 7 years.
OliverJones 5y ago
Vehicle electronics have some real environmental challenges as well. They have to function correctly * after they've been parked outdoors in Death Valley all day. * after they've been parked at -40 degrees for a long time. * when doused with slush containing road salt. * when their wiring harnesses deteriorate after a couple of decades of hard use. * at least for a few seconds after a catastrophic crash. It takes the kind of risk-taking guts that Tesla exhibits to push new, better, electronic parts into test and production. Most car companies' executives, designers, and test engineers just don't want to take those risks.
- cma 5y ago
  > risk-taking guts that Tesla exhibits to push new, better, electronic parts into test and production. After their delaminationg non-automotive grade screens I'd be wary. Their solution to it was to make the air conditioner always run in the sun when parked and promote it as a feature, wasting untold megawatt hours of electricity.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    That sounds like possible death trap. Drive Tesla to some place without range, stay out there for week. Then come back an notice car is dead and you can't reach next charging station. Maybe this is why Musk is making Starlink...
    - useful 5y ago
      you can tow charge an electric car with another car or truck
      - rampant_ai 5y ago
        Charging efficiency isn't 100%, so you'd have to tow it further than the range you need. Seems like it'd make more sense to just tow it to a charger.
        5y ago
dale_glass 5y ago
Wouldn't the solution be planning better? Sure, I understand that making a new car in combination with making a new ECU or brake controller on a new process is going to be stupidly dangerous and troublesome. So just don't. Rather than doing it as a part of a single project, there should be a department or separate company making the ECU/controller. This way when the semiconductor company moves forwards, ECU Group starts a project targeting the new process, and releases the results when it's ready. And meanwhile what goes into the cars is the ECU built on the previous, well tested process. Also, are modern cars really in much need of custom silicon? Micro-controllers are stupidly powerful now. There has to be off the shelf hardware capable of handling what a car needs. There are long standing architectures like ARM that don't require starting from scratch every time somebody makes a better chip.
- coryrc 5y ago
  Your comment displays a breathtaking amount of ignorance.
  - dale_glass 5y ago
    Then I welcome the opportunity to learn about something new. Please explain what's wrong, I'm most interested.
    - coryrc 5y ago
      Start reading IEEE, SAE, or other trade magazines; get an EE degree in the Midwest; get a job in the automobile supplier industry; go to industry conferences or just read their proceedings...
      - dale_glass 5y ago
        Or you could do me a favor and explain, since you already seem to know.
- pas 5y ago
  And usually this is what happens. Sort of. Big brands have new cars in the pipeline, and their product teams and thus the whole supply chain has newish stuff in development. [0] But since the market is rather fragmented/niche/specialized (even if the gross volume is large, the number of market participants is small), it simply makes no sense to launch a new component without already having orders for it. The problem is that when COVID struck almost everything was put on hold, scrapped, and ... it simply takes too much time to get things back on track. (As there is basically a full half year of shortage.) > are modern cars really in much need of custom silicon Well, again, because the market is special, there's a lot of custom stuff, even if it's almost the same chip internally. Lack of openness and standardized interchangeable components lead to this. (Yes, there are a lot of aftermarket parts, but they are probably even worse.) Also, probably the big dilemma for automakers is that they are simply not accustomed to this level of transparency in their supply chains. Now they point the blame at chipmakers, but they don't buy chips, they buy components from (the cheapest) vendors. (Who are cheap because they also never had any stored inventory, nor rainy day funds, nor any elegance and care in their designs that would allow this kind of retooling to other chips.) [0] But only very-very-very tiny incremental newishness. Large major version upgrades are seen as something that is too risky. (See this part from the article: "Quigley added that trying to design new chips and vehicles that will use them in parallel often introduces yet more headaches.") And even if the whole industry is a decade behind, there's no time to catch up, because there's just no market need for upgrading that subcomponent to have a better software/CPU platform. Instead automakers launch wholly redesigned lines. Or source completely new components for the new set of functionalities envisioned. (But if some vendor can meet the new specs with again a bit of incremental upgrade, then that'll happen.)
csours 5y ago
Disclaimer up front: I work for GM. I don't work on chips or components for my day job. What follows is solely my own opinion. Some things to emphasize: OEMs (GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, etc) do not design components, and they do not want to. They design specifications for components, and then get suppliers to bid. This is great for efficiency in established ecosystems, not great for agility. To my knowledge, GM did not cancel any chip orders, because GM itself had no chip orders (this is oversimplified). The suppliers cancelled chip orders. For a 1st tier supplier to move to a different process/chip would also be difficult, because they do the same thing the OEM does - supply a specification, and get 2nd/3rd tier suppliers to bid on it. A wholesale migration to a modern architecture is risky and costly. Smaller process/feature size on a wafer is believed to be less resilient, for example to heat and vibration. The risk to large automakers is that something goes wrong and they have to do a recall. The risk to up and comers (Tesla) is failure to grow. Also, Tesla has a small product line and absolute loads of cash. If you were going to design a new car electrical architecture from scratch today, you would have something like a 40-60V system with a centralized controller (or pair of controllers in a safety redundant configuration). Even with a largely cleansheet design, Tesla uses 12V because of the sheer ubiquity of 12V components.
- cainxinth 5y ago
  > A wholesale migration to a modern architecture is risky and costly. I have no doubt that your company and all the other big automakers are running the numbers and trying to weigh those risks and costs with the risks and costs of not updating. Given that the chipmakers and supply chain experts are not making rosy predictions for things to drastically improve in the next 12 months or longer, I wonder if the balance is shifting towards taking action.
  - csours 5y ago
    > "I wonder if the balance is shifting towards taking action." I can't find a public source, but some actions are being taken. Bear in mind that any major shifts would happen in a new product, that is, something 5-7 years out.
nbernard 5y ago
But for the cost, couldn't (for instance) a 16nm fab produce 90nm chips? If not, how complex would it be to "port" an existing 90nm chip, to produce a 16nm revision? Impossible, or quite easy but not cost effective? From the POV of the car companies, could such revisions be used directly, or would they need to be qualified in the same fashion as new parts?
- coryrc 5y ago
  No and about as expensive as having designed it in the first place. Given design costs are the largest portion of per-unit costs it's not a good investment.
  - pedrocr 5y ago
    Could you explain why not? Naively, having a much more dense process should allow automatic conversion. Going from 90nm to 16nm is 10x the density, that's a lot of margin for an automatic tool to use. Why doesn't that work?
    - coryrc 5y ago
      It's more than just a size change and there are features besides transistors. Say you have a 100 fF capacitor; is that because that's the right value based on an external constraint (say, interacting with a crystal) or because it's matching the inductance of a long internal path? Because you adjust them differently based on circumstance. And your transistors with a specific load must still supply the same current as before so they can't shrink as much as ones for internal logic. Also because the materials have changed the dialectic constant probably has and now the relative sizes of components need to adjust. And circuits are designed to minimize switching loss based on the old switching time and now they'll be wrong. Oh, and the breakdown voltage of the new process can't handle the voltage many of these old circuits use IIRC.
- VLM 5y ago
  If you're bored you can go to mycmp.fr and check their process catalog and compare a typical 55nm run to a 160nm run. Its not quite as standardized as ordering PCBs over the internet. Different metallization (you usually don't get to choose Al or Cu) will have different resistances. Generally the smaller processes will be faster so a design with no race conditions or metastability problems on 160 might not run reliably or at all on 55. Some processes are analog oriented so they'll guarantee up to 60 volts or more, if you're trying to design power devices, other processes are logic oriented and they might have a standard voltage of 2.5, 1.1 etc. You can design something that'll run on a 55nm process and something that'll give similar performance on a 160nm process BUT they'll be different designs. I think the closest analogy would be changing processes is like changing manufacturing material. You can make a car piston out of steel or aluminum but you can almost never just swap materials in an existing assembly line.
IshKebab 5y ago
Why can't they just make pin-compatible versions of the chips using new processes? That would take time, but surely easier than investing in new fabs for old processes?
leroman 5y ago
Sounds like the auto-makers play down on the talent they have and prefer to push the work outside, probably fearing they are not able to execute. This reminds me of being a 3rd party selling service to some company and they constantly ask for us to implement features that they could easily add - but can't. They don't say that flat out but we all understand what's happening..
phkahler 5y ago
Give me a microcontroller with between 32K and 2MB of onboard flash, some eeprom, multiple CAN peripherals, ADC, SPI, good timers, and some specialized peripherals - synched PWMs with dead time for driving power electronics, and some other special things. Dual-core lockstep for safety critical things (like the fronk latch). Some combination of all that at a price starting under a dollar. Oh, and a temperature range of -40 to +125C ambient. Can Intel do that on their obsolete 16nm multipatterning process for anywhere near the price target? Didnt think so.
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  ESP32 satisfies each of your requirement. They are available for $1(without BT sensor) in bulk pricing, have 4MB flash, have eeprom, have CAN, ADC, SPI, goof timers, good PWM, good DAC, is realtime, dualcore, and ambient temperature range of -40 to +125 C.
  - dvh 5y ago
    Aren't all esp32 out of stock on digikey?
  - phkahler 5y ago
    ESP is close. I was poking at Intel claiming they could help when they dont have anything close and wouldn't want to for the price.
rixed 5y ago
Why can't they transition to fewer chips instead? My old car runs fine controlled with a single atmega128 for the injectors, and that is the only chip in there (outside of the radio that I never use (I already carry a phone for all sort of entertainment))
- panick21 5y ago
  The amount of safety features you require alone would not allow this. To be compliant you need to move all your models to a number of safety features. In addition, you need to actually meet fuel standards, and that alone requires a whole lots of sensors. And people actually 'shocking' want to have advanced features, and the ability to link the car with the phone. The simple reality is people wouldn't buy a low tech car you describe. Seriously, people are not spending 30-50k on a car that can not play music from your phone. If you completely redesign the product, maybe you could reduce the number but that is effort that is actually far larger the problems with supply. And if you started to redesign the product now, you would almost certainty use more chips anyways because the requirements are going up, not down.
dotancohen 5y ago
The fine article quotes the Intel CEO: > "I’ll make them as many 16 nanometer chips as they want" However, > Carmakers have bombarded him with requests to invest in brand-new production capacity for semiconductors > featuring designs that, at best, were state of the art when the first Apple iPhone launched. He then says of that: > "It just makes no economic or strategic sense" So if we look at this from a capitalistic standpoint, automakers are not offering enough money to convince Intel to continue supplying their "old" types of chips. Either the automakers need to supply a convincing amount of money, or they need to adapt as their suppliers change priorities.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Or Intel will loose that entire market to some company that can make the business case happen.
- rasz 5y ago
  >automakers are not offering enough money to convince Intel to continue supplying their "old" types of chips Like that time Apple was "not offering enough money to convince Intel to continue supplying their "old" types of chips" aka the StrongArm
kazinator 5y ago
Any discussion about why you can't transition to newer chips that doesn't mention the software is incomplete. Chips are not fungible in part because of software compatibility. OK, so you got a newer chip, and have redesigned the board and everything to fit. Now you have to get all the old firmware running on it and validate it. If the new chip isn't a 100% backwards compatible version of the old one, including all the peripherals, that could be a considerable effort, fraught with risk.
- VLM 5y ago
  In the long run we'll only use FPGAs and soft cores. In 2050 if your old 2035 Ford needs a new ECU you'll just stuck a somewhat newer and larger FPGA on it, and if the 2035 ECU needs three hardware I2C bus with clock stretching, one of which bus has to do 10 bit I2C addrs and it also needs three hardware PWM pins with 11 bit resolution and two 8051 cores running at 5.25 MHz each and two CANBUS, you (or more likely Ford) will just compile the brand new FPGA to have exactly and precisely all that stuff and it'll work fine.
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    I think you are probably right, economies of scale mean that using a ridiculously powerful modern process to emulate an old processor often makes sense. The C64 mini runs a modern(ish) arm processor and an emulator to pretend to be a C64 - that's a machine that is literal multiple orders of magnitude more powerful than the original system.
  - bsder 5y ago
    > In the long run we'll only use FPGAs and soft cores. People have been saying this for decades and it is no truer today than it was then. FPGAs and soft cores lose on cost and power--which are both ferociously tracked engineering goals when you have real volumes. To a first and second order, if all FPGAs suddenly disappeared, nobody would care. Networking and test equipment would get somewhat more expensive and double their lead times. Nobody else would notice.
    - 5y ago
Azsy 5y ago
At the root is the question: "Do we make it more complex" or "Do we do try it 3 times". The carmakers have been making the wrong call for the past decades. One of their suppliers has eclipsed their impact on society, marking one of the first times in something like ~70 years that things didn't bend over to meet their needs. ---- And before you ask. Yes i would rather have a pace-maker with triple redundancy and thrice redesigned.
tbabb 5y ago
That website is unreadable on mobile due to ads.
- EastOfTruth 5y ago
  Block ads?
m0llusk 5y ago
Can't is a really strong word. One potential solution that might open some paths to innovation would be to split up the product a bit more. Ship vehicles with extremely basic features only and some of those features intentionally designed to be swapped out in the short term. Use third party suppliers to swap in instrument clusters, engine controllers, and such and allow those to use all the latest chips.
csense 5y ago
I always thought chips were dominated by fixed capital costs of fabs. If they were dominated by variable material cost of wafers, as the article seems to imply, it wouldn't make sense that we see 90nm microcontrollers that sell for $1 and a high-end 16nm PC CPU that sell for $1000. So the question is, what's the reason that 90nm microcontroller sells for $1? I'm trying, and failing, to figure out an economic model that explains the market dynamics we actually observe. If building a new 90nm fab costs $billions, almost as much as building a new 16nm fab, why does the 90nm microcontroller sell for 0.1% of the price of the 16nm Xeon? If building a new 90nm fab costs 0.1% as much as building a new 16nm fab, why can't existing chip companies, some startup or GM themselves spend $10's of millions building a fab that can unblock $100's of millions of product, and alleviate the shortage?
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  Chips made on modern processes are dominated by capital costs. Old chips are made on old foundries, which are fully depreciated and therefore have no capital costs. If you made a 90nm foundry today, then it probably couldn't sell those microcontrollers for less than $100 each, just like a modern CPU. >why can't existing chip companies, some startup or GM themselves spend $10's of millions building a fab that can unblock $100's of millions of product, and alleviate the shortage? They can't do it fast enough. Standing up a new foundry takes years under the best circumstances, and today you couldn't do it all, since all the tooling is sold out and deeply backordered. If GM could snap their fingers today and magic a cleanroom into existence, they'd still be waiting a hell of a long time to put tools in it. Secondly on the price question, microcontrollers just have way fewer gates than a desktop CPU. A dozen registers, a thousand bytes of RAM, a few kilobytes of flash. This makes them physically smaller, which lets you put more on a wafer, and makes the unit price cheaper. The total die area of the ATmega8 is just 7.9 square millimeters... at the 500nm node! https://zeptobars.com/en/read/atmel-atmega8 https://zeptobars.com/en/read/atmel-atmega8 This gets you 8,100 dies from a single 300mm wafer. (If there are any 300mm foundries at 500nm, which there probably aren't) Thirdly, what makes you think anyone could build a 90nm foundry at all? Take a look at a list of foundries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... I don't see anything making 90nm after 2014. Which makes sense. Fabs don't make all their tools in-house, that's done by vendors. As an example of one tool, by one vendor, the NXE:3400B EUV stepper by ASML. Unit cost, $175 million: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-euv-tools-order https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-euv-tools-order These are ultra-bespoke, super-low-volume machine tools. ASML makes a couple dozen or a hundred steppers of a given model, then shuts down production and starts upgrading to the next node. Is it even possible to buy a new 90nm stepper today? I'm sure they have all the documentation and could roll back to the previous generation easily enough, if they had to. (Which they don't! They are maxed out just supplying current-gen tools) But given all the voodoo in semiconductor lithography, people retiring etc, I bet that rolling back two decades would pretty much require starting from scratch.
etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
Can we manufacture designs for larger/older process nodes on newer ones? I understand it's a little bit like the DPI on a printer. I imagine there are many other changes, and expense, but would it work?
ChuckMcM 5y ago
The middle road is missed here. There are two problems, long duration supplies of a chip on the same process, and the cost of making chips. If the semiconductor companies can figure out an ASIC/FPGA type strategy that would allow any of the current chips in a car be produced "dynamically", then the semiconductor company could achieve their economies by just fabbing one design, and car companies could achieve longevity by getting commitments for production of that one design. Xilinx recently made some steps in a new direction by producing what they called an "RF" SoC. Where RF stands for radio frequency. Basically it had all of the analog to digitial and digital to analog bits on the chip in addition to some FPGA fabric and some ARM AARCH64 cores. Its expensive and small quantity but I think it will turn out to be important in the long run as the vanguard of chips that are not 'type specific' at the time of manufacture. Imagine a company that has the same basic FPGA architecture, packaged in a variety of automotive spec packages, with one-time programmability. That would reduce the number of SKUs considerably (basically by package type).
uvesten 5y ago
I did a short stint in the automotive industry ~10 yrs ago (on the software/safety side) at one of GM’s brands. The lack of forward-thinking was absolutely horrible, as was the constant insistence that anything new would never work (you remember the constant doomsaying about tesla?). I got out as fast as I could, I seriously think that being in that environment might cause serious mental impairment… So, not in the least bit surprised about this. Just nice to hear that the world is moving on whether the big auto brands wants it to or not.
theHIDninja 5y ago
But cars don't even need chips. Cars worked just fine for 70 years without chips. I don't get it.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Blame the EPA, California for more aggressive pollution and economy standards. You could still build a 1970s car today without chips, you just couldn’t sell it.
  - rasz 5y ago
    What do you mean blame? You dont want clean air? You want rolling coal diesels? and 7 liter 25l/100km family wagons?
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      Blame doesn’t always have a negative connotation. Obviously, the chips have worked well for us.
- panick21 5y ago
  Highly inefficient death traps with no active safety feature and no ability to play music or tell you where on the map you are. Great solution there buddy.

Is a part of the problem that the chips they are depending on are so trivial and small that you would end up losing more when cutting it up on a smaller process? I guess there is a limit to how many chips you could put on a single wafer even if the chip was only a single gate? Maybe the old nodes are efficient enough for the chips they need. Then again it would make sense to update designs frequently enough to stay at nodes that have plenty of capacity, perhaps every 5 or 10 years or so?

coryrc 5y ago
Capital costs of a fab are the single highest cost of producing chips. So long as the fab is running it's cheap to keep running so little reason to spend money to put cheap things on other processes (which is an expensive design cost) when you can later switch to a more complex chip (which should allow you to reduce supporting components too) which takes advantage of the new process size.

anaganisk 5y ago

When a Power PC is perfectly capable for a MARS rover missions, I dont see any reason why they must run Snapdragons. Unless some evil company, starts ditching physical controls or starts shoving Ads into Speedometer. And everyone follows. Im thankful that automobile tech didn’t discover electron yet. Imagine your speedometer consuming 200mb of ram.

willhinsa 5y ago
Don't give them ideas!
- ericbarrett 5y ago
  Too late: https://gizmodo.com/get-ready-for-in-car-ads-1846888390 https://gizmodo.com/get-ready-for-in-car-ads-1846888390
deleted 5y ago
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baybal2 5y ago
> Im thankful that automobile tech didn’t discover electron yet. Too late. I am well aware of a few car dashboard clients using it to their own detriment (imaging gluing CanBus I/O to electron.)
deleted 5y ago
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sircastor 5y ago
Speaking from experience, I can tell you automakers are already shipping vehicles that some Infotainment apps are web technologies. Not electron, but a similar system to run an encapsulated web page. I’m doubtful of the cluster being run by a browser engine though.
- joezydeco 5y ago
  Mazda has been using Opera running JS for their infotainment since 2014...

baybal2 5y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28709481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28709481 > 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.

wcunning 5y ago
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.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > 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.

lucidguppy 5y ago

This feels like lack of planning. The semiconductor industry was a known entity for many years before this level of integration came to vehicles. They should have known this would happen. Ultimately the industry will have to maintain their own production for consistent silicon.

dboreham 5y ago
As mentioned above there are folks who's entire job is maintaining the spreadsheet for said plan.
- hef19898 5y ago
  And you have to witness the mess without these people, or if they aren't allowed to do their job, in order to believe it. Better even, live the mess, I can assure you it is quite an experience.
jes 5y ago
> This feels like a lack of planning. In any complex undertaking, how can we know when enough planning has been done?
P24L 5y ago
These “low-tech” fabs are e.g. in Malaysia and they are often closed due to Covid..
coryrc 5y ago
Texas power outages took down one of the few major US plants and a random fire took down another, at the same time as a global pandemic. We're almost at the level of "imports banned from China"-levels of implausibility here. Sometimes shit happens.

bellyfullofbac 5y ago

I look forward to the cyber-punkish future (real soon now?) where there's an old beige computer case with a Pentium MMX sticker on it on someone's passenger seat with wires snaking into the engine bay. "Yeah the ECU died, so I had to hack together this replacement...".

tyingq 5y ago
There are cars where the enthusiast scene burns their own ECU EEPROMS to compensate air:fuel calculations after installing larger injectors, better flowing intakes, etc. Edit: There's also some "universal ECUs" from companies like Haltech. They sell a single ECU plus some adapter cables to make that single ECU run on a broad variety of cars from the 90's. Possible since the 90's cars all have the same rough types/numbers of sensors. Switchable software does the rest. I imagine this doesn't work past some year of make as the cars got more complex.
- _0ffh 5y ago
  Yeah, but I think those enthusiasts are mostly just fixing up calibration values, not changing the actual control software.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    It is more than just a few values, it's maps to plot a curve. But they do actual control software too, though that's less common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaSquirt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaSquirt
    - _0ffh 5y ago
      Well I never wrote "just a few", but I did write "mostly". Also, disclosure: I'm intimately familiar with the ECU software of a major player in the industry, though primarily the part that governs the air system. It's surprisingly sophisticated and extremely configurable just by fiddling with those calibration values.
  - 5y ago

schiffern 5y ago

> “We were able to substitute alternative chips, and then write the firmware in a matter of weeks,” Musk said. “It’s not just a matter of swapping out a chip; you also have to rewrite the software.” https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22595060/tesla-chip-shortage-software-rewriting-ev-processor https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22595060/tesla-chip-short...

baybal2 5y ago
ARM M family cores can run each other's code more or less. Only the libraries for I/O need to be rewritten. In some cases, there are drop in replacements (Gigadevices STM32 clones)
- im_down_w_otp 5y ago
  Are there even any ARM Cortex-M chips that are ASIL-B rated or better?
  - detaro 5y ago
    yes. ARM sells appropriate designs, and e.g. NXP offers some chips.
  - TaylorPhebillo 5y ago
    I think the Cortex-R chips are more targeted here- I think the V8-R chips are designed specifically for automotive use, so I assume they have appropriate ratings.
    - baybal2 5y ago
      There are very lazy car companies which simply specify "automotive certified" car chips for everything, including MCUs running window switches. So, don't be surprised $20 ARM-R based MCUs being used to do something trivial like driving window motor. I seen a few dashboard where there is an STM32 sitting connected to a single button, whose only duty is to register a key press, and burp something on the CanBus in response.

dboreham 5y ago

Admittedly it was a long time ago, but I worked in the semi industry and this isn't how things were done. We manufactured batches of totally obsolete EOLed devices for various customers when they had sufficient volume. Devices that are in volume production (e.g. for cars) are carefully managed by people who do nothing but ensure that they're available in the right place at the right time in the right volume. In order to not have product available to meet demand either a factory has to go on fire, or the customer has to screw up their forecast.

baybal2 5y ago
What an irony. Car makers with their volumes can buy decades worth of these STM32s for the price of a single car...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jnsaff2 5y ago
  Come on, let's say they get the STM32 for a quarter for a really high volume. There are tens if not hundreds of them in a car. 25k car would give you 100k stm32. 1k-10k cars is hardly decades.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    And that’s just one component.
mkr-hn 5y ago
The customers screwed up the forecast. That's a huge part of the problem. They assumed the pandemic would kill demand and cancelled orders, but it didn't, and the cancelled capacity was already sold to someone else.
- tyingq 5y ago
  As I understand it, there's also the case that you can't just move from one fab to another of the same process size at will. There's different setup/software/procedures, so the capacity isn't instantly interchangeable. There may even be fabs with excess capacity, but no "ready" customers.

DarkmSparks 5y ago

Really well written investigative piece. Its so often forgotten that safety critical hardware like a car ecu dances to a different rhythm than consumer electronics that just has to not explode in your pocket..

fidesomnes 5y ago

Just like how they can't build electric vehicles 10 years ago. Yeah sure. The automotive industry is run on room temperature IQ's.

adamrmcd 5y ago

I'd love to see Ken Sherrif do a teardown of some vintage ECM. https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/when-did-cars-get-computerized-264028 https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/when-did-cars-get-comput... (tldr) > So instead of one clear answer, we have three possibilities: 1957 Rambler, 1958 Chrysler or 1968 Volkswagen.

rasz 5y ago
Early electronic fuel injection was pretty shit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetronic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetronic No throttle control, cold start compensation with a bimetal strip + heater coil controlling extra air flap. Sensors were super primitive or omitted altogether (no temp sensors), air was measured with turbines restricting flow, no lambda, etc etc. Crazy Honda fact: all their ECUs from 1992 (P05) onward had full facility to drive individual coil on plug, but officially Honda switched away from mechanical distributor in 1999 (S2000?). You can trivially convert 92 car with a small adapter board, ECUs shipped with all the needed firmware and hardware in place sitting unused for 7 years.

OliverJones 5y ago

Vehicle electronics have some real environmental challenges as well. They have to function correctly * after they've been parked outdoors in Death Valley all day. * after they've been parked at -40 degrees for a long time. * when doused with slush containing road salt. * when their wiring harnesses deteriorate after a couple of decades of hard use. * at least for a few seconds after a catastrophic crash. It takes the kind of risk-taking guts that Tesla exhibits to push new, better, electronic parts into test and production. Most car companies' executives, designers, and test engineers just don't want to take those risks.

cma 5y ago
> risk-taking guts that Tesla exhibits to push new, better, electronic parts into test and production. After their delaminationg non-automotive grade screens I'd be wary. Their solution to it was to make the air conditioner always run in the sun when parked and promote it as a feature, wasting untold megawatt hours of electricity.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  That sounds like possible death trap. Drive Tesla to some place without range, stay out there for week. Then come back an notice car is dead and you can't reach next charging station. Maybe this is why Musk is making Starlink...
  - useful 5y ago
    you can tow charge an electric car with another car or truck
    - rampant_ai 5y ago
      Charging efficiency isn't 100%, so you'd have to tow it further than the range you need. Seems like it'd make more sense to just tow it to a charger.
      - 5y ago

dale_glass 5y ago

Wouldn't the solution be planning better? Sure, I understand that making a new car in combination with making a new ECU or brake controller on a new process is going to be stupidly dangerous and troublesome. So just don't. Rather than doing it as a part of a single project, there should be a department or separate company making the ECU/controller. This way when the semiconductor company moves forwards, ECU Group starts a project targeting the new process, and releases the results when it's ready. And meanwhile what goes into the cars is the ECU built on the previous, well tested process. Also, are modern cars really in much need of custom silicon? Micro-controllers are stupidly powerful now. There has to be off the shelf hardware capable of handling what a car needs. There are long standing architectures like ARM that don't require starting from scratch every time somebody makes a better chip.

coryrc 5y ago
Your comment displays a breathtaking amount of ignorance.
- dale_glass 5y ago
  Then I welcome the opportunity to learn about something new. Please explain what's wrong, I'm most interested.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    Start reading IEEE, SAE, or other trade magazines; get an EE degree in the Midwest; get a job in the automobile supplier industry; go to industry conferences or just read their proceedings...
    - dale_glass 5y ago
      Or you could do me a favor and explain, since you already seem to know.
pas 5y ago
And usually this is what happens. Sort of. Big brands have new cars in the pipeline, and their product teams and thus the whole supply chain has newish stuff in development. [0] But since the market is rather fragmented/niche/specialized (even if the gross volume is large, the number of market participants is small), it simply makes no sense to launch a new component without already having orders for it. The problem is that when COVID struck almost everything was put on hold, scrapped, and ... it simply takes too much time to get things back on track. (As there is basically a full half year of shortage.) > are modern cars really in much need of custom silicon Well, again, because the market is special, there's a lot of custom stuff, even if it's almost the same chip internally. Lack of openness and standardized interchangeable components lead to this. (Yes, there are a lot of aftermarket parts, but they are probably even worse.) Also, probably the big dilemma for automakers is that they are simply not accustomed to this level of transparency in their supply chains. Now they point the blame at chipmakers, but they don't buy chips, they buy components from (the cheapest) vendors. (Who are cheap because they also never had any stored inventory, nor rainy day funds, nor any elegance and care in their designs that would allow this kind of retooling to other chips.) [0] But only very-very-very tiny incremental newishness. Large major version upgrades are seen as something that is too risky. (See this part from the article: "Quigley added that trying to design new chips and vehicles that will use them in parallel often introduces yet more headaches.") And even if the whole industry is a decade behind, there's no time to catch up, because there's just no market need for upgrading that subcomponent to have a better software/CPU platform. Instead automakers launch wholly redesigned lines. Or source completely new components for the new set of functionalities envisioned. (But if some vendor can meet the new specs with again a bit of incremental upgrade, then that'll happen.)

csours 5y ago

Disclaimer up front: I work for GM. I don't work on chips or components for my day job. What follows is solely my own opinion. Some things to emphasize: OEMs (GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, etc) do not design components, and they do not want to. They design specifications for components, and then get suppliers to bid. This is great for efficiency in established ecosystems, not great for agility. To my knowledge, GM did not cancel any chip orders, because GM itself had no chip orders (this is oversimplified). The suppliers cancelled chip orders. For a 1st tier supplier to move to a different process/chip would also be difficult, because they do the same thing the OEM does - supply a specification, and get 2nd/3rd tier suppliers to bid on it. A wholesale migration to a modern architecture is risky and costly. Smaller process/feature size on a wafer is believed to be less resilient, for example to heat and vibration. The risk to large automakers is that something goes wrong and they have to do a recall. The risk to up and comers (Tesla) is failure to grow. Also, Tesla has a small product line and absolute loads of cash. If you were going to design a new car electrical architecture from scratch today, you would have something like a 40-60V system with a centralized controller (or pair of controllers in a safety redundant configuration). Even with a largely cleansheet design, Tesla uses 12V because of the sheer ubiquity of 12V components.

cainxinth 5y ago
> A wholesale migration to a modern architecture is risky and costly. I have no doubt that your company and all the other big automakers are running the numbers and trying to weigh those risks and costs with the risks and costs of not updating. Given that the chipmakers and supply chain experts are not making rosy predictions for things to drastically improve in the next 12 months or longer, I wonder if the balance is shifting towards taking action.
- csours 5y ago
  > "I wonder if the balance is shifting towards taking action." I can't find a public source, but some actions are being taken. Bear in mind that any major shifts would happen in a new product, that is, something 5-7 years out.

nbernard 5y ago

But for the cost, couldn't (for instance) a 16nm fab produce 90nm chips? If not, how complex would it be to "port" an existing 90nm chip, to produce a 16nm revision? Impossible, or quite easy but not cost effective? From the POV of the car companies, could such revisions be used directly, or would they need to be qualified in the same fashion as new parts?

coryrc 5y ago
No and about as expensive as having designed it in the first place. Given design costs are the largest portion of per-unit costs it's not a good investment.
- pedrocr 5y ago
  Could you explain why not? Naively, having a much more dense process should allow automatic conversion. Going from 90nm to 16nm is 10x the density, that's a lot of margin for an automatic tool to use. Why doesn't that work?
  - coryrc 5y ago
    It's more than just a size change and there are features besides transistors. Say you have a 100 fF capacitor; is that because that's the right value based on an external constraint (say, interacting with a crystal) or because it's matching the inductance of a long internal path? Because you adjust them differently based on circumstance. And your transistors with a specific load must still supply the same current as before so they can't shrink as much as ones for internal logic. Also because the materials have changed the dialectic constant probably has and now the relative sizes of components need to adjust. And circuits are designed to minimize switching loss based on the old switching time and now they'll be wrong. Oh, and the breakdown voltage of the new process can't handle the voltage many of these old circuits use IIRC.
VLM 5y ago
If you're bored you can go to mycmp.fr and check their process catalog and compare a typical 55nm run to a 160nm run. Its not quite as standardized as ordering PCBs over the internet. Different metallization (you usually don't get to choose Al or Cu) will have different resistances. Generally the smaller processes will be faster so a design with no race conditions or metastability problems on 160 might not run reliably or at all on 55. Some processes are analog oriented so they'll guarantee up to 60 volts or more, if you're trying to design power devices, other processes are logic oriented and they might have a standard voltage of 2.5, 1.1 etc. You can design something that'll run on a 55nm process and something that'll give similar performance on a 160nm process BUT they'll be different designs. I think the closest analogy would be changing processes is like changing manufacturing material. You can make a car piston out of steel or aluminum but you can almost never just swap materials in an existing assembly line.

IshKebab 5y ago

Why can't they just make pin-compatible versions of the chips using new processes? That would take time, but surely easier than investing in new fabs for old processes?

leroman 5y ago

Sounds like the auto-makers play down on the talent they have and prefer to push the work outside, probably fearing they are not able to execute. This reminds me of being a 3rd party selling service to some company and they constantly ask for us to implement features that they could easily add - but can't. They don't say that flat out but we all understand what's happening..

phkahler 5y ago

Give me a microcontroller with between 32K and 2MB of onboard flash, some eeprom, multiple CAN peripherals, ADC, SPI, good timers, and some specialized peripherals - synched PWMs with dead time for driving power electronics, and some other special things. Dual-core lockstep for safety critical things (like the fronk latch). Some combination of all that at a price starting under a dollar. Oh, and a temperature range of -40 to +125C ambient. Can Intel do that on their obsolete 16nm multipatterning process for anywhere near the price target? Didnt think so.

YetAnotherNick 5y ago
ESP32 satisfies each of your requirement. They are available for $1(without BT sensor) in bulk pricing, have 4MB flash, have eeprom, have CAN, ADC, SPI, goof timers, good PWM, good DAC, is realtime, dualcore, and ambient temperature range of -40 to +125 C.
- dvh 5y ago
  Aren't all esp32 out of stock on digikey?
- phkahler 5y ago
  ESP is close. I was poking at Intel claiming they could help when they dont have anything close and wouldn't want to for the price.

rixed 5y ago

Why can't they transition to fewer chips instead? My old car runs fine controlled with a single atmega128 for the injectors, and that is the only chip in there (outside of the radio that I never use (I already carry a phone for all sort of entertainment))

panick21 5y ago
The amount of safety features you require alone would not allow this. To be compliant you need to move all your models to a number of safety features. In addition, you need to actually meet fuel standards, and that alone requires a whole lots of sensors. And people actually 'shocking' want to have advanced features, and the ability to link the car with the phone. The simple reality is people wouldn't buy a low tech car you describe. Seriously, people are not spending 30-50k on a car that can not play music from your phone. If you completely redesign the product, maybe you could reduce the number but that is effort that is actually far larger the problems with supply. And if you started to redesign the product now, you would almost certainty use more chips anyways because the requirements are going up, not down.

dotancohen 5y ago

The fine article quotes the Intel CEO: > "I’ll make them as many 16 nanometer chips as they want" However, > Carmakers have bombarded him with requests to invest in brand-new production capacity for semiconductors > featuring designs that, at best, were state of the art when the first Apple iPhone launched. He then says of that: > "It just makes no economic or strategic sense" So if we look at this from a capitalistic standpoint, automakers are not offering enough money to convince Intel to continue supplying their "old" types of chips. Either the automakers need to supply a convincing amount of money, or they need to adapt as their suppliers change priorities.

hef19898 5y ago
Or Intel will loose that entire market to some company that can make the business case happen.
rasz 5y ago
>automakers are not offering enough money to convince Intel to continue supplying their "old" types of chips Like that time Apple was "not offering enough money to convince Intel to continue supplying their "old" types of chips" aka the StrongArm

kazinator 5y ago

Any discussion about why you can't transition to newer chips that doesn't mention the software is incomplete. Chips are not fungible in part because of software compatibility. OK, so you got a newer chip, and have redesigned the board and everything to fit. Now you have to get all the old firmware running on it and validate it. If the new chip isn't a 100% backwards compatible version of the old one, including all the peripherals, that could be a considerable effort, fraught with risk.

VLM 5y ago
In the long run we'll only use FPGAs and soft cores. In 2050 if your old 2035 Ford needs a new ECU you'll just stuck a somewhat newer and larger FPGA on it, and if the 2035 ECU needs three hardware I2C bus with clock stretching, one of which bus has to do 10 bit I2C addrs and it also needs three hardware PWM pins with 11 bit resolution and two 8051 cores running at 5.25 MHz each and two CANBUS, you (or more likely Ford) will just compile the brand new FPGA to have exactly and precisely all that stuff and it'll work fine.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  I think you are probably right, economies of scale mean that using a ridiculously powerful modern process to emulate an old processor often makes sense. The C64 mini runs a modern(ish) arm processor and an emulator to pretend to be a C64 - that's a machine that is literal multiple orders of magnitude more powerful than the original system.
- bsder 5y ago
  > In the long run we'll only use FPGAs and soft cores. People have been saying this for decades and it is no truer today than it was then. FPGAs and soft cores lose on cost and power--which are both ferociously tracked engineering goals when you have real volumes. To a first and second order, if all FPGAs suddenly disappeared, nobody would care. Networking and test equipment would get somewhat more expensive and double their lead times. Nobody else would notice.
  - 5y ago

Azsy 5y ago

At the root is the question: "Do we make it more complex" or "Do we do try it 3 times". The carmakers have been making the wrong call for the past decades. One of their suppliers has eclipsed their impact on society, marking one of the first times in something like ~70 years that things didn't bend over to meet their needs. ---- And before you ask. Yes i would rather have a pace-maker with triple redundancy and thrice redesigned.

tbabb 5y ago

That website is unreadable on mobile due to ads.

EastOfTruth 5y ago
Block ads?

m0llusk 5y ago

Can't is a really strong word. One potential solution that might open some paths to innovation would be to split up the product a bit more. Ship vehicles with extremely basic features only and some of those features intentionally designed to be swapped out in the short term. Use third party suppliers to swap in instrument clusters, engine controllers, and such and allow those to use all the latest chips.

csense 5y ago

I always thought chips were dominated by fixed capital costs of fabs. If they were dominated by variable material cost of wafers, as the article seems to imply, it wouldn't make sense that we see 90nm microcontrollers that sell for $1 and a high-end 16nm PC CPU that sell for $1000. So the question is, what's the reason that 90nm microcontroller sells for $1? I'm trying, and failing, to figure out an economic model that explains the market dynamics we actually observe. If building a new 90nm fab costs $billions, almost as much as building a new 16nm fab, why does the 90nm microcontroller sell for 0.1% of the price of the 16nm Xeon? If building a new 90nm fab costs 0.1% as much as building a new 16nm fab, why can't existing chip companies, some startup or GM themselves spend $10's of millions building a fab that can unblock $100's of millions of product, and alleviate the shortage?

sbierwagen 5y ago
Chips made on modern processes are dominated by capital costs. Old chips are made on old foundries, which are fully depreciated and therefore have no capital costs. If you made a 90nm foundry today, then it probably couldn't sell those microcontrollers for less than $100 each, just like a modern CPU. >why can't existing chip companies, some startup or GM themselves spend $10's of millions building a fab that can unblock $100's of millions of product, and alleviate the shortage? They can't do it fast enough. Standing up a new foundry takes years under the best circumstances, and today you couldn't do it all, since all the tooling is sold out and deeply backordered. If GM could snap their fingers today and magic a cleanroom into existence, they'd still be waiting a hell of a long time to put tools in it. Secondly on the price question, microcontrollers just have way fewer gates than a desktop CPU. A dozen registers, a thousand bytes of RAM, a few kilobytes of flash. This makes them physically smaller, which lets you put more on a wafer, and makes the unit price cheaper. The total die area of the ATmega8 is just 7.9 square millimeters... at the 500nm node! https://zeptobars.com/en/read/atmel-atmega8 https://zeptobars.com/en/read/atmel-atmega8 This gets you 8,100 dies from a single 300mm wafer. (If there are any 300mm foundries at 500nm, which there probably aren't) Thirdly, what makes you think anyone could build a 90nm foundry at all? Take a look at a list of foundries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... I don't see anything making 90nm after 2014. Which makes sense. Fabs don't make all their tools in-house, that's done by vendors. As an example of one tool, by one vendor, the NXE:3400B EUV stepper by ASML. Unit cost, $175 million: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-euv-tools-order https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-euv-tools-order These are ultra-bespoke, super-low-volume machine tools. ASML makes a couple dozen or a hundred steppers of a given model, then shuts down production and starts upgrading to the next node. Is it even possible to buy a new 90nm stepper today? I'm sure they have all the documentation and could roll back to the previous generation easily enough, if they had to. (Which they don't! They are maxed out just supplying current-gen tools) But given all the voodoo in semiconductor lithography, people retiring etc, I bet that rolling back two decades would pretty much require starting from scratch.

etaioinshrdlu 5y ago

Can we manufacture designs for larger/older process nodes on newer ones? I understand it's a little bit like the DPI on a printer. I imagine there are many other changes, and expense, but would it work?

ChuckMcM 5y ago

The middle road is missed here. There are two problems, long duration supplies of a chip on the same process, and the cost of making chips. If the semiconductor companies can figure out an ASIC/FPGA type strategy that would allow any of the current chips in a car be produced "dynamically", then the semiconductor company could achieve their economies by just fabbing one design, and car companies could achieve longevity by getting commitments for production of that one design. Xilinx recently made some steps in a new direction by producing what they called an "RF" SoC. Where RF stands for radio frequency. Basically it had all of the analog to digitial and digital to analog bits on the chip in addition to some FPGA fabric and some ARM AARCH64 cores. Its expensive and small quantity but I think it will turn out to be important in the long run as the vanguard of chips that are not 'type specific' at the time of manufacture. Imagine a company that has the same basic FPGA architecture, packaged in a variety of automotive spec packages, with one-time programmability. That would reduce the number of SKUs considerably (basically by package type).

uvesten 5y ago

I did a short stint in the automotive industry ~10 yrs ago (on the software/safety side) at one of GM’s brands. The lack of forward-thinking was absolutely horrible, as was the constant insistence that anything new would never work (you remember the constant doomsaying about tesla?). I got out as fast as I could, I seriously think that being in that environment might cause serious mental impairment… So, not in the least bit surprised about this. Just nice to hear that the world is moving on whether the big auto brands wants it to or not.

theHIDninja 5y ago

But cars don't even need chips. Cars worked just fine for 70 years without chips. I don't get it.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
Blame the EPA, California for more aggressive pollution and economy standards. You could still build a 1970s car today without chips, you just couldn’t sell it.
- rasz 5y ago
  What do you mean blame? You dont want clean air? You want rolling coal diesels? and 7 liter 25l/100km family wagons?
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    Blame doesn’t always have a negative connotation. Obviously, the chips have worked well for us.
panick21 5y ago
Highly inefficient death traps with no active safety feature and no ability to play music or tell you where on the map you are. Great solution there buddy.