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Comment by jankeymeulen | Hacker News Reader

Thousands to tens of thousands per car? I think you're off by an order of magnitude.

Maybe on microcontrollers, but the chip shortage is affecting all the "popcorn chips" too.

And there are a LOT of those.

How many chips per window motor driver? Solenoid locks. ABS systems. Radar. Tire pressure sensors. Temperature sensors. LCD displays. Peril-sensitive rear view mirror. Brake lights. Keyfobs. I can go on and on.

The reason why electric cars reduce the bill of materials so much over internal combustion engines is the fact that cars are already rolling computer banks. An electric car just gets rid of those silly parts required to turn plant slime into flame.

I know a typical Mercedes has roughly a hundred individual computers, not too far reached to think the average chip count could be 10 or higher per device on the can bus.

Most of those chips would be standard commodity silicon components (think op-amps and such) as opposed to purpose-built automotive micro controllers.

Are they really? I was under the impression that automotive grade components were at least certified to a wider temperature range than typical other components. JEDEC 94A annex A mentions that the operational temperature range is between -40C to 150C for automotive grade components.

You are correct. Automotive parts are also often certified to higher electrical stress levels as well.

This is one of the downstream problems of the shortage: even if you produce the chips, you may not have enough test equipment to qualify and certify them in a timely fashion.

Uh, no. There's a ton of dedicated integrated circuits that are highly optimized for one specific task, and which contain everything you need. For example, an ABS module is going to contain something like the L9396, which does signal conditioning for wheel speed sensors, and mosfet drivers for the solenoids. All in one little package configurable by SPI.

And even the standard commodity silicon components are going to be AEC-whatever certified, as others have mentioned.

If there's a ton of dedicated circuits highly optimized for each specific task, then I don't know why there'd be 10+ of them per task as OP claims. :)

Almost everything in a car has a number of chips. Power regulations, communication buses... and in electric cars with thousands of batteries, at least one chip per battery for protection.

This is blatantly false, unless you are confusing battery for an assembled battery pack. In EVs each battery management IC can run somewhere in the range of 4-14 cells in series per chip, and they almost universally run banks of up to 100 cells in parallel. For example, in the tesla model s the pack is comprised into submodules of 76 cells in parallel and 6 of those groups in series per management chip--so only one management chip per 456 cells.

Electric cars have ONE battery with thousands of *cells*. I do realize that the colloquial term for "cell" is "battery" (ex: an AA cell is called a battery), but it becomes important to be precise with our words when talking about manufacturing.

Small scale Li-ion does a protection-IC per cell (ex: cell phones), mostly because cell phones are so small they only use one cell.

Larger scale Li-ion, such as Laptop batteries, may use one-IC per cell, OR one-protection IC for all 3x or 4x cells combined. As long as all the cells are soldered together, one protection IC is cheaper and still usable.

At electric-car scales, you have thousands-and-thousands of cells. You can't just manage all of them with one IC, so you build an IC per bundle. Maybe 48 cells or 100-cells per IC or so.

Indeed yes I meant cells, I'm not a native English speaker.

> At electric-car scales, you have thousands-and-thousands of cells. You can't just manage all of them with one IC, so you build an IC per bundle. Maybe 48 cells or 100-cells per IC or so.

Ah okay, I had more expected something on the order of 1 IC per 4 cells to allow individual cell health monitoring.

> Indeed yes I meant cells, I'm not a native English speaker.

You're doing fine. Native English speakers don't know the difference between cell or battery either. This is more of a precise / technical engineering distinction.

* 9V Battery (https://imgur.com/FHJdhIK), a collection of 6x cells.

* AAAA Cell (one singular chemical reaction of 1.5V)

Notice that the imgur is wrong: they call it a AAAA battery (when the proper term is a AAAA cell).

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"Battery" is a bunch of objects doing one task. Originally, a "battery" described cannons. Or two rooks (in chess) that work together. Or... 6x 1.5V cells working together to produce a 9V battery.

In Russian the word "battery" is most commonly used to mean a hot water radiator in an apartment.

Which is a collection of fins.

An electrical battery is called akkumulator.

I always thought the "cell" in "cellular phone" came from the network topology, not the battery format.

Oh it does come from the network region/cells. In fact in the old days when the phones were the size of an actual brick they were probably powered by a proper multi-cell battery. (Did I miss a joke?)

What? You think it's ten thousands to hundred thousand. Hundred thousand seems excessive to me.

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