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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

Is this the ongoing saga of car companies refusing to ever actually invest in/update any of their electronic designs?

[edit: the answer is yes]

The answer is no. Car companies are doing no electronic designs. They are done by dozen layers of subcontractors like Bosch, Valeo or Continental or myriad others. Car companies depend heavily on them.

There is probably at least 1000 electrical engineers in the Gothenburg, Sweden area alone that would disagree with you. Companies like VCC, Geely, CEVT, Volvo, Polestar and first tier electronics, digital, system and software consultants are sweeping the job market clean to be able to handle all in-house electronic design work.

The pendulum from just sourcing from companies like Bosch, Continental turned hard about five years ago. Now electronic and SW design is critical diversification, and part of what creates core value in automotive.

Sounds logical to me. I never understood this subcontracting thing with many layers. At the end somebody must do the job and has only fraction of original order revenue.

On the other hand if car companies would buy the few remaining components for electrical vehicles from subcontractors… well, all the cars and brands would be exactly the same with minor adjustments.

Going back 10-ish years or so, basically everybody was writing requirement specifications to be included in RFQs. Primarily sent to the multinational suppliers like Continental. Sourcing and integration was the technical focus. And project management etc.

Now it is 100% in the other direction. There are engineers everywhere. Basically, if there is a space (under stairs even), there is a desk with an engineer. Doing serious design work. The new automotive cybersecurity requirements also contribute to renewed need for control and detailed knowledge of subsystems.

> Now electronic and SW design is critical diversification, and part of what creates core value in automotive.

It is also the part that sucks most from a consumer's point of view. As a consumer, I want choice, not lock-in by the manufacturer after I buy a car.

That is sort of orthogonal to what we are talking about. Cars are getting more digital based functionality - driver assist, entertainment, connection to third party services. They could be developed by some supplier, or the car manufacturer.

If they are based on open protocols, standards, provide API, is released as open source could happen in either of those two scenarios. I know manufacturers that use, promote and contribute to open source and standards. Do you think the big automotive suppliers are better or worse in this regard?

Also, choice here is kind of fuzzy. Choice in car brand and model? Choice in apps running in the enterrainment system? Choice in what SW is being executed by one or more of all the hundreds of CPUs, MCUs, GPUs, NPUs in the car?

There's nothing difficult about it. If Apple builds a car media/navigation system, I'm sure they can agree with car manufacturers about an interface. The problem is: manufacturers don't want this.

For entertainment, car services like they most certainly do. Look at what VCC, Polestar is doing with Apple in CarPlay and apps. They also provide APIs to allow third party value add services. It is a booming market.

Not quite. You need bigger feature sizes to get good yields and good voltage resistance and performance over wider temp ranges, so a modern design would still need to be built on large-feature nodes. The car industry did cause this, but they caused it with their whims, purchasing practices, nasty contract terms, and general fucking over of suppliers, not with their allegedly outdated designs.

The main problem is that the car industry didn't want to spend the money to safety-certify new microcontroller designs - by law/regulations, that's a requirement for anything that's safety critical.

New microcontroller designs that would meet the requirements for safety certification in those conditions are also manufactured on larger process nodes.

Honestly, the MCU market is not that bad off according to some people in the embedded industry that I know. MCUs can be made, profitably, on newer smaller nodes.

It's the things like power management ICs, that have to deal with much larger currents and voltages, that are problematic, and you can't respin those on smaller node, and that's before you go for automotive grade tolerances.

That new MCU with new safety certification (and there's a lot of those going on, even a layman like me can see a push for equivalent of Integrated Modular Avionic in automotive) is going nowhere if it can't get power.

the article say to invest in 40nm. why not move up to 28nm or even 14nm?

28nm by today's standard is already a very old tech. maybe the car vendors should move up

- Cost. Double or more.

- Would require a redesign.

- Certain parts of the die cannot be shrunk: bond pads, esd protection, output drive transistors.

- Certain parts of chips are designed for proprietary processes (eFLASH, analog)

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