Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

The suppliers are running in pretty thin margins aren’t they? Did they really have any choice but to cancel those orders or potentially go bankrupt?

If you sit on someone’s shoulders and forget that they’re doing most of the work, you can be shocked all you want when they collapse out from under you but nobody on the ground is going to have any sympathy at all for you.

I’ve worked for software subcontractors and it’s always frustrating when the customer is so excited about all the things we’re going to accomplish together, all the plans that hinge on our mutual success, and isn’t it so wonderful that they’re getting such a great deal on it too?

Meanwhile we’re slowly going broke because we can’t make money on that sweetheart deal loaded with scope creep not spelled out properly in the contracts. Good luck with those plans when we go under.

>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).

Actually this point is something im curious about - it seems to be redundant to have a 3X redundant processor ..probably placed in different places on the car body for safety.

Would that not be superior to current architecture..while being able to tap into the most modern chip architecture of the day ?

I'm not a car engineer and dont understand CANBUS, etc. But just wondering if this is indeed possible.

I'm not in the car industry. But I spec mixed analog/digital parts and so see a lot of ads and press releases for automotive parts. I'm seeing increasing offerings of two pair Power over Ethernet controllers, cables, and connectors.

That makes me think that as companies retire legacy gas/diesel products they'll probably switch to an automotive PoE standard. Allows you to to power the window lift regulator, door locks, and read the switches off a single 20 gauge cable. Weld a fully assembled door assembly to the body and than plug in a single cable. What's not to like?

>40-60V system

What makes that voltage a better trade off?

> 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.

Yeah, I remember some talk about moving car buses to 24V or maybe even 48V but that didn't seem to have gained ground.

> 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.

There are some great stories about SpaceX trying to source components this way and then finally ending up having to DIY.

What they found was that modern CAD and rapid prototyping made it easier than it used to be. Car companies would probably find the same thing, and have the luxury of doing it piecemeal at their own pace by gradually insourcing components in the order of necessity or benefit.

The “do not want to” part probably points to these companies being run by Ivy League MBAs educated in the 1990s and 2000s when this was conventional wisdom. The world is changing.

>>>To my knowledge, GM did not cancel any chip orders, because GM itself had no chip orders (this is oversimplified).

Come on, Really? So GM cancelled the orders for all the tings that the chips go in, and you want to spin that as "well technically GM did not cancel the chips"

That is bullshit.... The supply chain does not work like that, if GM cancels an order for 100,000 ECM's the supplier for the ECM is going to cancel their order for 100,000 chips for them to make the ECM for GM, it is unrealitic to believe anything else would happen.

> 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).

Aircrafts historically been using high frequency AC, on both sides of the iron curtain (as both sides were copying each other.)

Old analog instruments actually benefited from AC availability.

And when SMPS were big, and heavy, transformers were much more reliable, and smaller (and they are still are, depending on the frequency)

3 phase power was also giving some interesting cost cutting benefits at the time

As far as I can tell, Tesla plays fast and loose, treating their product like a manufacturer of consumer electronics and not a manufacturer of a dangerous and durable good. That obviously allows them to out-compete other auto manufacturers who are more aware of things like product liability.

See the Toyota accelerator-gate lawsuits. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic... :

> However, on October 24, 2013, a jury ruled against Toyota and found that unintended acceleration could have been caused due to deficiencies in the drive-by-wire throttle system or Electronic Throttle Control System (ETCS). Michael Barr of the Barr Group testified[30] that NASA had not been able to complete its examination of Toyota's ETCS and that Toyota did not follow best practices for real time life critical software, and that a single bit flip which can be caused by cosmic rays could cause unintended acceleration. As well, the run-time stack of the real-time operating system was not large enough and that it was possible for the stack to grow large enough to overwrite data that could cause unintended acceleration.[31][32] As a result, Toyota has entered into settlement talks with its plaintiffs.

Not following software best practices(i.e. ISO 26262) can expose your customers to unnecessary risk and leave your company vulnerable to lawsuits. Tesla may learn a very expensive lesson one day, or they may get lucky. Time will tell.

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Depending on the design of your system and software stack, switching SoCs can be anywhere from a massive effort to a simple recompilation. Even switching architectures could be trivial for some components(i.e. a UI written in HTML5 making REST API calls) or a nightmare for others(ECU, ABS or other real-time algorithm written to use bare metal modules on the SoC without an OS providing abstraction).

So much speculation here. Let me set the record straight(er). (I worked in Tesla FW, left 5 years ago.) Tesla does use industry best practices. All code must pass MISRA checkers, code is modular, and reused when possible. We used all sorts of chips (that were auto qual) of many different architectures. We had extensive tools for e.g. stack monitoring, diagnostic readouts, and much more. If you move from, say, one ST ARM chip to another one in a similar family, the peripherals may be a little different, but generally work the same way (with maybe a few more or fewer features). So reworking the I/O drivers is work, but given the excellent layering of Tesla "body control" FW, it's really quite straightforward to pick a different processor from a given family. It's for sure true that if you went from ST ARM to Freescale/NXP ARM the peripherals are diff, so yes, more time would be needed to write the I/O drivers. But the effort ongoing when I left was exactly to make the appropriate SW generalizations so it would be possible to do exactly this.

To elaborate on this, the feature sets on these low level microcontrollers are no standardized. There is no common API for them to implement. Even chips coming from the same manufacturer will have different hardware capabilities, and although low-level drivers can abstract that way to a certain extent, there will always be differences.

The biggest challenge is when you need to update your firmware to use a microcontroller from a different manufacturer. Often times these chips are specifically chosen due to the set of hardware functionality they offer, and the firmware is written to take advantage of that from the start. The two are coupled.

Now you are forced to use a different chip, and the firmware that was written for a specific set of hardware now has to be modified for a new chip that may have a different feature set. Things fine print on how things like Analog to Digital converters becomes extremely important.

Tesla is much better at writing software than most of their competitors. That's how they can adapt so quickly.

They also do a lot more in house than their competitors. That means they can optimize their development processes, and align with chip suppliers across different components. If you have to work with a multitude of suppliers that each ship their own hardware and software, life is a lot more complicated. Changes take years in such an environment. Even a simple thing such as over the air updates to software is still science fiction in a large part of the industry. VW famously struggled with doing that for the ID.3 only managing their first updates fairly recently.

Of course, Tesla is still affected by supply issues as well. They can't switch suppliers every quarter.

I feel like GM and Ford are at US Government and NASA size where getting any change through takes so long and so much middle management and red tape that it stretches to infinity.

I’m sure Tesla is more agile than that. For better or worse sometimes…

If this is true, stay away from anything Tesla does. I work in the industry. 2 examples: 1) you have to change a transistor with one from a different supplier, same characteristics. You need to do some HW engineering tests. If the transistor is part of a safety relevant function, you need to do also system, SW and safety tests. And then environmental and EMC tests. Of course you can tailor but you need a very good justification. 2) You change the microcontroller. You need new SW, new tools (emulators - takes some time to be delivered), new sourcing, new HW design etc. It is from development perspective a new product so you need testing (HW, SW, System, Safety) and design validation (environmental tests, EMC) , maybe more than one loop.And when everything is passed and sourcing is done (i.e. you can buy the component) you can start production.

What software can turn a MSP430 or 68 knockoff into a highly efficient power transistor? Take everything Musk says with some caution..

I get that what Musk quoted is not a trivial task, and if accurate, is probably much quicker than OEMs and Big Auto could do since Tesla is presumably much better at software.

The article quotes Intel at 16nm, which is, what, 10 years from cutting edge process node? At this point mature OEMs and Big Auto should have been on a refresh process to auto-migrate forward the chips. The semiconductor industry is 40-50 years old now. And new generations produce better chips (cost, power use, performance).

As other comments say, it smacks of laziness and lack of forecasting.

Tesla has other advantages, since they are so much more vertically integrated, they can probably manage migrations a lot more easily and centrally.

Big Auto is more like "Big assemble OEM parts". OEMs make all the components, Big Auto just wants to screw them into place and wire them together. It's part of why they suck at software that integrates things: They don't make any of the components, and a dozen different departments order them from a hundred suppliers, so getting interfaces/protocols/specs is a lot more time consuming than for Tesla.

Why did car companies allow themselves to make such a strategic mistake? Shouldn't they be on a standard microcontroller architecture?

Why not even use ARM, X86, etc? It'd save them money at this point. And there wouldn't be a supply risk.

I mean they also just dropped certain feature, like radar on autopilot.

CPUs aren’t the only silicon out of stock right now. Most silicon doesn’t even run software.

That’s a fancy way of portraying big tech debt. They will pay for these decisions later.

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)

Weeks? This has been going on for almost 100 weeks

> 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.

> It takes the kind of risk-taking guts that Tesla exhibits to push new, better, electronic parts into test and production.

Its not a risk if you are vertically integrated, have the software infrastructure and have everything need to do the needed testing and validation.

It would take weeks just to talk to the supplier about maybe doing a change for many other car makers.

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.

Due to covid I’m back to driving trucks and they have the same supply problems as everyone else — the dude I’m working for can’t find a used truck to put me in because new trucks are taking 6-8 months to get.

Used trucks sell as fast as they go up on the websites (with the lease returns from the company we’re running for selling even before that) and the truck dealers apparently think this is the time to charge excessive finance fees (basically doubling the cost of the truck) because they can.

Quite a stressful time…for him. I don’t really care since I’m making money and team driving isn’t as bad as I remember it from the last time I did it 23 years ago.

What an irony. Car makers with their volumes can buy decades worth of these STM32s for the price of a single car...

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 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_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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.)

Don't give them ideas!

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.

Maybe we'll have CMOS printers by then... (I can dream!)

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.

As mentioned above there are folks who's entire job is maintaining the spreadsheet for said plan.

> This feels like a lack of planning.

In any complex undertaking, how can we know when enough planning has been done?

These “low-tech” fabs are e.g. in Malaysia and they are often closed due to Covid..

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.

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.

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.)

Your comment displays a breathtaking amount of ignorance.

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.

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.

Early electronic fuel injection was pretty shit. 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.

Or Intel will loose that entire market to some company that can make the business case happen.

>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

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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.

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.

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.

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.