The big automotive semiconductor problem | Hacker News Reader

The big automotive semiconductor problem

asianometry.substack.com

58 pointspicture104 comments

From the article:

> Mobile phone SOCs integrate a substantial amount of function right onto the chip. Why hasn’t that been the case for the car?

Because your mobile phone SoC is not certified for -20/+80 degrees Celsius, copious amount of vibration, error-free operation on many environments (incl. inputs with wrong voltages, shorts, etc.), and have a lifetime of 10+ years with the same performance characteristics.

Your car is running a real-time simulation of your engine to keep itself operational, and it's a much serious business than running Android or iOS.

More information: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scand...

They do however use SoCs for HMI/head-units/carputers now however.

The bigger reason is just the nature of automotive development. Every part is developed by a specced or sourced by different teams and outsourced to a different Tier 1/2/3. Things are designed to be modular, so if you pick Option A for something, it might use ECU A, and if you pick Option B, they might pack a whole different ECU B. Also, every ECU is costed down to only support the intended application, so ECU A likely doesn't have the extra bandwidth to add on extra features for Option B.

Also, none of this is decided or developed at the same time, so you have all the different features and ECUs developed throughout. Some things are changed mid program. Some things carry over from previous programs, so it's usually just easier to go your own way and not work with other teams on combining features.

Every automotive OEM has a person who comes up with the brilliant and cost saving idea of combining ECUs. I know 4 such people from different OEMs but they have all failed for some of the reasons mentioned above.

SoCs in head-units would still be automotive qualified variants (temperature grade, etc).

-20 ° C - + 80 °C is for keyfobs. For ECUs in the passenger compartment is -40°C - 85 °C and for ECUs in the engine compartment is -40 °C - 105 °C.

When you buy semiconductors on digikey or whatever, there are several different 'classes' of performance. Everyone imagines milspec being the top one, and it's true, but for most people the ideal class is 'automotive'... Because precisely of what the parent said: tolerances of temperatures to 140F or more. Think of a car sitting in a baking parking lot in Phoenix, no shade.

You don't build semiconductors for that purpose by using 10nm process then adding a lot more redundancies when all you need is a simple opamp. You instead build the thing beefy and resistant to the environment.

And all the excitement over new chip plants by TSMC etc, won't do a thing for these automotive applications.

There are classes ABOVE mil-spec. These are several "Space grade" classes above mil-spec which have far wider temperature and radiation ranges.

Also... mobile phone SoC are made in much higher quantities then car chips: there are much more phones shipped then cars. Therefore R&D costs per unit are significantly lower with phone chips and you can spend more.

>> SoC is not certified for -20/+80 degrees Celsius

That is basically the operating range of the average graphics card these days. Not many people go sub-ambient with their cooling but no graphics card would complain if they did. The actual silicon is perfectly fine with such temperatures. The only real issue is the external cooling rig, a classic engineering problem that any car company shouldn't have a problem solving. A water cooler tied to the vehicle's coolant loop would easily cap the upper temperature range at water boiling points. A car engine has plenty of power available for fans or even air conditioning if necessary. Hide the controller chips somewhere in the passenger compartment and the humans will die of heat before the silicon.

I’m not talking about processor temperatures. The temperatures I’m talking about are ambient/enclosure temperatures. So, the board, and all integrated components will be at least that ambient temperature, and they’ll work without any transient errors.

Also this means, no solder joints or any other component won’t act funky.

A transient error in your GPU is a one pixel blip. In an ECU, that’s a power loss event in best case.

In low temperatures you start having issues with moisture saturating the air. Things get wet out of nowhere. There are also electrolytic capacitors which are water based so these need to be ruled out as well. Given air has at any given time a lot of water and water goes through a phase change at sub zero i find the comparison quite invalid.

That's a difference with automotive/aviation products. They will all be in sealed containers and then the actual circuitry will all be covered in plastic. There shouldn't be any exposed metal that could possibly short, even if immersed in water. Pouring buckets of water on a running engine (ie a gap in the hood closure on a rainy day) or even into the passenger compartment (ie sunroof left open) shouldn't do much of anything to a car's electrical systems.

(This is also done for fire safety reasons. Any metal that could possibly short if wet could also ignite a fire during/after a crash.)

Just as an example, a BY Audi has it's TCM (transmission) module under the us passengers side floor carpeting. It is in 'a box", but the box is in no way sealed. The metal box that is the TCM as a whole is made of metal, and maybe attempted to be sealed a bite but isn't sealed.

B6 Audis have a design problem with their sunroof drains. When they clog up, unknown to you, the water will pool in passengers footwell area. It takes a while to notice this as a person, as there is 4-6" of foam padding between the metal floor of the car, and where you rest your feet . The TCM lives between these layers, and eventually, in the lake that will form, submerging your TCM -- leaving you with yet another reason to hate your Audi.

This is early 2000's. Late 200* a8 models had I believe 30+ different "computers" living in the same over metal under foam situation.

An aside, if you ever wash the engine bay of a car with low pressure water, I'd suggest covering the blatant electronic bits with some plastic bags, and leave the car idling when you do so -- that way if/when it starts to sputter or just dies, you have a general idea of where it all went wrong.

They really are not as water tight as we all assume.

This is early 2000's. Late 200 a8 models had I believe 30+ different "computers" living in the same over metal under foam situation.*

I now have secondhand PTSD from reading this, and thinking about the Audi owners who have found out the hard way.

Dead leaves caught in your sunroof can make your transmission flake out. I'm sure the owner's manual, on page 935, instructs you to ream out the drains with a pipe-cleaner every 5,000km so that your car can shift properly. The only word I can think of for this is..."perverted".

It only took one early 2000s Audi for me to swear off German cars for the foreseeable future. I don't know that their questionable design choices are applicable to the rest of the industry's chip practices.

Story time:

Around that time they saved a few bucks by switching the thermostat housing from metal to plastic and not changing the design at all so that it could be a drop-in replacement. With that distinct lack of engineering effort, they were prone to splitting at corner-induced stress lines in the plastic.

In an ordinary car this wouldn't be an issue; thermostats fail regularly, so their housings are readily accessible -- kind of like how most cars make changing the oil filter a manageable task. In an Audi however, the process is to take the front half of the car off to expose the engine, take the front half of the engine off, and then replace the now easily spotted housing.

So anyway, I don't know of a better place for the thermostat housing to split in half (leaking coolant out faster than you can pour it in) than the middle of fucking nowhere WY. By this time mobile phones were pretty common, but I swear to God they were sharing a single 1Mbps connection across ten counties; only about every third Google search would succeed without timing out, and as a precursor to learning how to take apart my car it was quite literally faster to code up a crude strip-the-garbage proxy (paginating compressed text and nothing else to send back) and deploy that to a home server than it was to try to surf the modern web over at best a 1k connection.

In retrospect the coding wasn't necessary since speeds increased to something manageable in the wee hours of the morning when everyone else was asleep and since it was absolutely not a 1-day job, but it was a bit of a fun experience anyway.

By sealed you mean enclosed but not air tight right? Air tight sealing would require a pressure vessel for electronics which i never saw both on airplanes nor on cars.

The plastic coating though, I have seen. Such coating completely changes the thermals of the electronics making the OPs claims that a home GPU could just be strapped into a car very unlikely.

> Your car is running a real-time simulation of your engine to keep itself operational, and it's a much serious business than running Android or iOS.

Well, it takes some parameters, goes into a lookup table and decides how much timing to retard, or fuel to give, and probably has a o2 sensor, checks knocking, etc. All done on pretty barebones 80's tech.

You're right on the tables part, but these are the words of the guy who worked on BMW for 14 years, who's on the video.

And, as a person who's doing simulation coding, I tend to behave to him about that.

The relevant part starts here: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scand...

>Your car is running a real-time simulation of your engine to keep itself operational, and it's a much serious business than running Android or iOS.

Lets not exaggerate :) ECU reads a bunch of sensors, does some mild compute, uses that to do a table lookup, interpolates and slaps the result into actuators. 8bit 10MHz is enough to accomplish this task.

These are not my words. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30875680

How does functional integration interfere with robustness?

The discrete components are designed, tested and verified after a long stint and their specs are frozen. It's a bit like space hardware. You verify an older CPU design can work reliably in space, and certify that processor. Then, you use the same foundation for a decade or so.

It's same with automotive industry. You have a well defined and certified stack from Delco, Bosch, Delphi, etc. and you can trust that hardware. Integration makes you return back to square one.

I remember Toyota tried unifying some control units into a single box, and 5-6 years considered realistic if not a little optimistic.

To add to that, some of these features are extremely specialized, and for each feature, 1-2 of the big players might have a huge technical advantage and economies of scale in production and in supplying. This leads to higher barrier to entry and not enough margin for other players to replicate the feature.

Funny, this sounds exactly like why microservices have an advantage over monoliths in big organizations.

SpaceX works around that by using consumer grade stuff and just replicating it 3 times. Tesla also managed to handle issues with supply shortages very well.

The old practices are just not good enough.

> SpaceX works around that by using consumer grade stuff and just replicating it 3 times

Falcons get refurbished after short flights. That reduces the emphasis on durability. Redundancy defends against random errors, reducing the need for radiation hardening. It does less against wear and tear.

> The old practices are just not good enough.

True, but also think about the path dependence of the old companies. They have withered a lot of ups and downs, they are not the innovators, they are the very slow incrementalists that despite this release a new boring model every few years dressed up as the new best thing ever. (If you have seen a car from one manufacturer you have seen them all from them for the past decades too.)

The whole car industry is a relatively high volume & low margin & medium risk business. (The unit economics is great, but any risk kills profitability, so there was a lot of consolidation and convergence.)

Basically the car industry is like the "iphone industry" except there's some actual price competition and worse fundamentals, plus Apple is relatively young (and Steve set up a pretty high pace, and expectations, plus the fundamentals of the components - eg. semi industry, radios, displays - are really moving forward, whereas internal combustion engines, and the material science of other car components are not).

it's really fantastic though, for parts availability and reliability. People don't remember how absolute shit any pre-80's vehicle is. Like, shit tier reliability from carbs, tune ups, constant work. 100k? that car is dead and done! Now the average vehicle age has been climbing and climbing. The best part is that 2005 brake caliper is probably just a slightly more refined version from the 90's

Yes, exactly, no questions there :) I remember here in the 90s (barely post-USSR Hungary) going anywhere with a typical car was almost like a choose your own adventure, where adventure meant something will randomly go wrong, and if you are lucky you have spare parts with you, or maybe you can simply find a workaround (for example when the cooling system loses all the water because the radiator suddenly bursts means you could still make progress, of course slow and stopping if the engine gets too hot). And in the early 90s nobody had mobile phones, so it involved a bit of hitchhiking to the nearest phone too!

Cars tend to fail more disastrously now, but less often. If my coil back goes I am SOL. There's a reason they tell you to keep one in the trunk. The difference to that and a cap+rotor is, a cap and rotor is about 12 bucks and can be done on the side of the road without tools, and that cap and rotor fits about 50 million 4 cylinders manufactured in the last 50 years, and tends to degrade more gracefully.

On the flip side, cars now tend to run more efficiently till they break fully and go into limp mode or won't run - a lot less tuneups and tweaking, no adjusting the valves and carb as the car ages

I've lost coil twice. Once was during driving. I lost a single cylinder, check engine light turned on. I was able to drive up to 70Km/h without my check engine light start blinking (means "you can melt your catalytic convertor, exhaust is too fuel rich, reduce throttle!").

Went to my service guy, he put down his tea on my engine, replaced it and his tea was half (~10 minutes). Also put in a new set of plug wires since my set was ~18 years old and gone hard at that point.

I went to office, lost 30-40 minutes at most.

The second one happened when the car was at park, at night. Started it in the morning, it was running off, so went to service. Same story. 70Km/h speed, 10 minute change, sans the cables this time.

Newer cars tend to use one per plug. It's just a disconnect, pop-off, push in, plug, go. 2-3 minutes at most.

yeah, this is actually something we are looking at for the Saab T5 engine series. It uses an integrated coil pack for all the cylinders, which in turn means, a failure of one is a failure of all. I know some of the tuners have switched to using more normal coil pack setups, but unfortunately the T5 system is pretty unique so its not a thing that can be easily hot swapped.

One interesting tidbit is the coil packs run a bit of current over the plug when it's not sparking to measure ionization to determine engine conditions (i think mostly knock)

> It uses an integrated coil pack for all the cylinders, which in turn means, a failure of one is a failure of all.

That’s interesting. My coil pack is also integrated, but it’s designed to fail independently. Maybe it’s the design of the coil, but not an inherent shortcoming of the system itself.

> One interesting tidbit is the coil packs run a bit of current over the plug when it's not sparking to measure ionization to determine engine conditions (i think mostly knock)

Didn’t know that. I knew that engine knock was measured with vibration sensors, crank position relative to other things and engine output measurements via load sensors (irregularity), but ionization measurement is new to me. Have any sources, so I can read more?

I think it was basically since Saab was fairly early to the coil pack game, these "Direct Ignition Cassettes" was in production in 88...

Yeah... no standard knock sensor, which is the normal way to do things, but it's much improved because a regular knock sensor on a 900 can't really tell, what cylinder is knocking (and no cylinder behaves the same, regardless of what you do), so on a distributed 900 with the Bosch systems, it'll hold boost back or (with ezk) retard knocking for a few full cycles.

With ionization it can determine -which- cylinder is knocking and adjust timing and fuel on that one specifically

Here's a good article

https://eeuroparts.com/blog/tech-corner-saab-trionic-and-ion...

That was an awesome read, thank you!

Tesla is not a car. It looks like one, it might behave a bit like one but i would not touch such a thing even with a 9 m pole. I heard too many horror stories about Tesla requirements.

If it looks like a duck (car), and moves like a duck (car), and quacks like a duck (car), then it's a duck (car) in my book.

What other thing should it have? An ICE? Then Nissan Leaf, Ford F150 electric, and BMW i series are not cars either.

One method of making a chip 'tougher' is to physically increase the size of the semiconductor elements (e.g. transistors, FETs). This would seem incompatible with highly-integrated ICs.

This is true. For radiation hardening for space, this is exactly what is required for anything more harsh than LEO. And as a consequence, the generation of processors and memory typically used are 10-20 years behind the current state of the art. That's simply the price of reliability in harsh environments!

This article does a good job outlining why these systems can't just be replaced with a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino: Durability. At one point I was interested in replacing the ECU in my old '88 Suburban. The ECU is probably the only "real" bit of electronics in the whole vehicle. And yet after almost 35 years it's still doing fine. The Arduino based ECU I was looking into, as it turns out, is a great hobby project, but not so good for reliability due to the harsh conditions.

Still, I think electronics in modern vehicles are completely over the top, but then again... I drive a 30+ year old Suburban. I'm prone to thinking that way :D

The space shuttle used a hardened 386 (or something similar) that cost a bazillion dollars. The drone currently on Mars used commidity off the shelf chips (snapdragon IIRC). The harsh conditions thing is not something to laugh at, but I also think we might have over-engineered somethings a bit.

> The space shuttle used a hardened 386 (or something similar) that cost a bazillion dollars.

Their main computers were a custom variant of the IBM 360 mainframe. They also duplicated it 5x: 4x with majority vote for error correction, plus a backup running separately-developed software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/4_Pi

> The drone currently on Mars used commidity off the shelf chips (snapdragon IIRC). The harsh conditions thing is not something to laugh at, but I also think we might have over-engineered somethings a bit.

It should be noted that drone is 1) an engineering experiment and 2) no one will die if it malfunctions, so they can afford to be a bit sloppier.

SpaceX is also using commodity hardware, but they duplicate it 3x with majority vote for error correction.

do you happen to have pointers evidencing this handy? IS this also true for Dragon?

It is, see https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/12/27/dont-push-that-button-...

Thanks! I still hope to learn how they deal with infamous "bi directional requirements Tracing" and similar bureaucracies in the name of dependability. How do they evidence engineering scrutiny, how do the embed it into their processes in such a way that they _evidence_ scrutiny and deliberate engineering _without_ massive paper safety tigers, _without_ tons of slow bureaucracy?

Some of it is classified but you can often find info on certain open sites at NASA or SNL.

The surface of Mars being further from the sun and inside an atmosphere has vastly fewer issues with radiation.

In both cases you're well protected against the solar wind by distance and atmosphere in the case of the Mars rover and by the Van Allen belts in the case of the Space Shuttle. But both still have to worry about cosmic rays. Mars's thin atmosphere helps a bit with that but not nearly as much as you'd like.

EDIT: I suspect a lot of what lets you use Snapdragons in the rover is the idea of making error resistant systems rather than error resistent devices. The same thing that let us replace a single $10,000 hard driver with ten $100 hard drives in a RAID with the same performance and reliability despite the individual drives being much worse.

That’s not really accurate the sun causes real issues in LEO. See chapter 2 starting on page 9 here:

https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1101&co...

As an anecdotal bit of support, I seem to recall recently SpacX loosing a number of satellites in their LEO constellation because of sun activity

Yes, but that was not due to EM activity, it was because the solar activity made the atmosphere go up higher than usual which meant that the atmospheric drag was too strong for the engines to overcome.

Biggest difference is the lack of risk to human life, tbh

But more issues with temperature swings—ideally radiation wouldn't be the main concern here in Earth's atmosphere.

Rovers regulate internal temperatures to keep electronics happy. Ex: https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/rover/temperature/

We can't teleport something from one atmosphere to another, though. It's a long trip.

That’s a risk, but the chip is off for the trip which makes a significant difference. Fail safe is much easier if you can run diagnostics without needing the system to be doing it’s job.

Also, human lives aren’t at stake if things go awry.

I designed a drop in replacement ignition ECU for Ferrari 308 cars from the 1980's (the Magnum PI model), as after almost 40 years a lot of them are now failing. When I started the project, I had no idea how miserable an environment the car actually was. It wasn't hard to get a prototype that basically worked, but I had to go through quite a few revisions before I got something that could withstand the torture of everyday use (and things like electrically dirty jump starters that would completely fry my units until I put a protective power supply in it against +/-100VDC surges.)

My daily is also an 88. It's running very standard Bosch of that era. At some point I took my 93 (same model) and swapped it with newer fuel management, ecu, etc out of a 2005 Saab. Same valve cover allows you to the stock coils and setup, a timing sensor solves that, and boom, good to go.

Well sorta, turns out the 88 is far more reliable and consistent - except for a few hard to find parts... namely the distributor is a total piece of crap after that many years... and it's not very efficient. I get 50% more performance and 50% more gas milage on the uprated one.

Difference in reliability is probably... once every 25k versus once every 50k though.

Those bosch systems were all over volvo, saab, porsche, VW, Audi, etc and are dead reliable but not very hackable.

> Automakers found that mechanical, hydraulic or pneumatic controls failed to achieve enough accuracy and consistency over each vehicle's usage life to meet these emissions tests. This was especially the case as the car aged.

Decades ago, I owned an old Alfa Romeo that incorporated a complicated cam system to control the oxygen ratio to the fuel injection system. More complex than your typical 1-dimensional function of a cam, this cam was "two-dimensional" in its output. The cam follower was able to slide along the axis of the cam based on something or another (RPM? temperature?) and the profile of the cam varied from one end to the other. Now there's a pretty wild "mechanical computer".

A mechanic though told me that over time the middle of the cam would wear — a kind of "saddling" — and engine performance (and probably emissions) would suffer.

Every car engine loses gradually power with wear. Top gear famously showed this multiple times with their older car episodes. Usually it was in 20-30% range.

Basically new car is a 100% system and from first kilometer / month of ageing and exposition to elements various items go down the hill. Each car type had its own set of reasons for that, but result was +-same.

>Decades ago, I owned an old Alfa Romeo that incorporated a complicated cam system to control the oxygen ratio to the fuel injection system. More complex than your typical 1-dimensional function of a cam, this cam was "two-dimensional" in its output. The cam follower was able to slide along the axis of the cam based on something or another (RPM? temperature?) and the profile of the cam varied from one end to the other.

V-tech, yo.

You laugh, but the 1980 Alfa Romeo Spider (with the Arese DOHC 4) was the first regular-production car with variable valve timing. This might actually be what the grandparent post is referring to-it had a mechanical variator attached to the intake camshaft to adjust the phase of valve opening....

Sounds a bit like BMW’s VANOS or Honda’s Vtec. Variable cam timing is super cool tech and a huge reason newer cars are so much faster than old cars.

If described correctly, it is a different concept. Variable cam timing in the context of VANOS / Vtec / VVT refers to variable timing on the camshaft that controls valves.

This sounds different, and I think it refers to mechanical fuel injection. Several automakers experimented with mechanical fuel injection in the 80's and early 90's, but I think the concept died pretty quickly. It was rather complex, failure prone, and less efficient than EFI.

Much earlier than that; there were running mechanical fuel injection protoypes for gas engines before WW1 (diesel got FI quicker); mass-market mechanical fuel injection followed WWII-the Mercedes 300SL had FI in 1955.

Thing is, mechanical FI is almost as hard to tune for emissions and economy as carburetors, so electronic control is necessary.

Chrysler offered an EFI system based on the Bendix Electrojector in '58, but the tech was not fully baked, for one thing, the electronic controls were vacuum tubes in an enclosure in the dash; I think there may be one remaining operational '58 Imperial with that system still running....

Anyway, Bendix sold the patents for the Electrojector to Bosch, which a decade later had developed them into the J- and K- Jetronic transistorized throttle-body EFI systems so beloved by Porsche 914 enthusiasts.

Oh interesting. The way I read it it sounded like it was manipulating the cams. I have heard of mechanical fuel injection — pretty cool stuff but yeah very finicky.

What devices are left that are fairly normal (that normal people might interact with in a given week), mechanical or electromechanical, have at least modest complexity, and have no microchips?

Locks? Guns? What else?

EDIT: perhaps an extra requirement that it's fairly durable, i.e. easily lasts ten years of normal use.

EDIT2: maybe it should also fit the requirement that it's a current model in production and that you don't have to go out of your way to find a non-semiconductor version.

Push lawnmowers, dirtbikes, or chainsaws typically do not have microchips, and they are all quite complex. Also, old elevators often had purely relay logic, and I've heard that it is often more cost-effective to repair old elevators than to replace them outright, so if you live in a really old building the elevator might still be click-clacking away.

Then there are washing machines and dryers. Most new models are stuffed to the guts with computer chips, but older styles are still available, new (Speed Queen) or used (appliance refurbishment shops). Old ones are purely electro-mechanical, with some rather ingenious timer boards that do a lot with only a few contacts, a tiny motor, and a large resistor.

(I helped repair an old dryer a few months ago: the large resistor is for the dryer's auto dry mode. The wetter the clothes, the more power the heating coils will draw through the resistor, which lowers the voltage of the power the timer motor receives, slowing it down. Once the clothes start getting dry, the voltage goes back up and the timer speeds up again.)

"dirtbikes, or chainsaws typically do not have microchips"

Interesting, good examples.

"The wetter the clothes, the more power the heating coils will draw through the resistor, which lowers the voltage of the power the timer motor receives, slowing it down. Once the clothes start getting dry, the voltage goes back up and the timer speeds up again."

Sounds like this kind of ingenuity is on its way out, though. I expect the vast majority of washers/dryers have semiconductors in today.

> Push lawnmowers, dirtbikes, or chainsaws typically do not have microchips, and they are all quite complex.

Is this still the case for the newer battery electric variants of these tools? The battery itself will have microchips for the BMS, and if those tools are using BLDC motors, those motors will contain a controller likely implemented with microchips.

Obviously battery-powered tools will have chips. But at this time those are mostly still gas-powered.

Obligatory Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster video since you mentioned old appliances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y&ab_channel=Techn...

Interesting question.

* it's surprising how many dishwashers still use spring-loaded timers to sequence their operations. Although at this point mine is 19 years old so maybe that doesn't count.

* Likewise, my iron filter is sequenced by a mechanical timer (run off an electric motor), but my water softener's controller is fully electronic.

* A lot of houses still have mechanical mercury thermostats.

* The flush valve in your toilet tank is completely mechanical and surprisingly complex. Once you take it completely apart you realize that there's more to it than just a float that shuts off a valve.

* I'm always amazed by the centrifugal clutches in weed whackers and small gas-powered lawn appliances.

Should be more things I can come up with...

A lot of houses still have mechanical mercury thermostats.

yeah, the houses that have heat. ask an HVAC guy about the new digital thermostats. I'm not even talking about the Nest etc. smart home ones, just the basic new digital ones that croak after three years. Keep the mercury-switch ones as long as you can.

Toilets are a great example, thank you.

> EDIT: perhaps an extra requirement that it's fairly durable, i.e. easily lasts ten years of normal use.

Moka pot / press to do coffee. Lasts ten years easily.

All my tools and powertools. Some of them are old, really, really old (I've got my "favorite" screwdriver which is 30 years old). Some are manual, some require electricity.

Using daily my mechanical watch and my floorstanding loudspeakers which others mentioned. The loudspeakers are hooked to an amp to DAC to computer, so the "chain" is not exactly microchip free though.

EDIT: also various types of chimneys and stoves are still microchips free. Although there's a move towards freaking "smart" pellets stove that require electricity, WiFi, that are noisy but, hey, they're programmable. Thanks but no thanks. Good old chimney for me.

Tools for sure, power and hand. Aside from a voltage regulating circuit most power tools are super simple, make a thing spin to cut other things. I also love using proper hand tools like a plane or hand saw.

A lot of musical instruments come to mind.

Also many plumbing related things in a house such as faucets, temperature shutoff valves, toilets.

Manual kitchen gadgets are usually pretty simple but still interesting. Peelers and slicers, pasta machines, oil expeller, scales.

I'm still mesmerized by microwave ovens. Sure, all of them now come with a chip, but that part is guaranteed 100% shit (I mean who the fuck designs these unergonomic monsters anyway!?)

But the magnetron in them is complex, has to be machined to a high precision, yet they are a pretty old piece of completely analog technology.

Regarding microwave oven ergonomics, the best one I've seen doesn't have old-school dials, but a touch-sensitive slider bar. You may think this is bad, but it works very, very well. The front of the microwave has the time display, the time slider bar, and two buttons: stop/cancel and start/+30sec. Open the door and there are a few auto cook options and power level options. There is no number keypad at all; the slider bar gives you both very fine and coarse-grained control, depending on how fast you slide across it. It's all very intuitive, and I was very impressed with it.

https://www.lg.com/us/cooking-appliances/lg-LMC0975ST-counte...

Oh, and it actually looks slick/sleek :)

Recently I interacted with a brand new but old-schoolish one (dials and all), which was only openable by pushing a big analog button (which required a surprising amount of force). And this design seems common despite the totally idiotic UX of pushing a button that slightly opens the door, so then you have to open the door by hand, instead of putting a fucking handle on the door so it could be one move. (Probably because it's that much cheaper to have a door without a handle.)

Bicycles. The greatest form Of transport ever created.

Good one.

After reading this thread my list is:

* Toilets

* Bicycles

* Water heaters

* Locks

* Guns

The rest seem either a little too specialized, simple, or already in the process of being replaced by things with microchips.

A few of these may be replaced as well (locks?), but it's not quite happening yet.

Mechanical watches fit the bill here. Not everyone has them, but they are common enough

Older clothes washing machines, maybe? Though, they are getting replaced by machines with ic type controllers too.

Is gas water heater complex enough?

Gas water heaters often have control boards and displays with buttons. The only type that might not are the low-efficiency type with a pilot flame and room air intakes—but even those usually have forced exhaust fans that require some sort of smarts to know when to turn on.

Your typical $400-$500 tank style gas water heater has none of those things. It has a PCB with some analog circuitry to do sparky magic to light the pilot light. A gas/propane heater or stovetop is basically the same thing in a different form factor.

Tankless water heaters are necessarily much more fancy.

AKA low-efficiency water heaters.

Can you explain? Are you talking about inline water heaters as the efficient ones?

I have only seen the tank style in the U.S. So it seems to fit, though I guess you are implying those will get replaced by something better.

High efficiency condensing water heaters still have a tank.

Can opener

Stapler

Loud-speakers

Shop vac

There's nothing mechanically or electrically complex about a speaker. It's a coil and a magnet attached to a bit of paper/plastic.

High-order crossover filter?

Well, if we're going there, we might as well just delve into the whole Active Speaker thing and get into the amplifiers.

But a basic speaker (driver) that's been around for decades is essentially a small linear motor: one moving part and very simple in operation.

2-way and 3-way speakers have been around for longer than I've been alive.

"Loud speaker" surprises me. Are you sure they don't use semiconductors for amplification?

Speakers? Definitely not. The amplifier will, but not the loudspeakers. That's basically a magnet, a coil, and a paper cone.

Cheap loudspeaker products, like [1] often have built-in amplifiers.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/AmazonBasics-Computer-Speakers-Desk...

And, as someone mentioned above, usually a RLC filter

> It would be a misconception to look at your standard internal combustion car as a fundamentally mechanical device. Today's cars are some of the most complex electronic systems mankind has ever made.

As a car restorer, mechanic and enthusiast, yes. This is also why bringing a car in for service has ballooned in cost over recent years. Oddly, it’s become remarkably _easy_ to chase down a problem in a car because the systems will just tell you exactly what’s wrong. Now it’s just a huge time sink to actually fix the problem because it’s probably buried deep in the gubbins of the car and the parts are very costly.

The current practice of having a $3 part that fails after 40,000 miles, then needs $2000 worth of labor to replace, makes me want to murder certain vehicle line execs at certain companies...glares in the direction of Munich...

My personal pet peeve theory is that automotive engineering missed the memo that the hard part of software based systems is integration and remote dependencies.

All their engineering and supply structures have evolved from mass producing mechanical marvels which happen to have a few electrical and electronic E/E components, marvels and components which are hard to manufacture but simple to integrate ("plug together", essentially).

At the core, their thinking goes "Creating components is expensive. Putting components together is cheap. Also minimize prototype scrap with extensive planning and scrupulous list checking processes. If parts don't work together you didn't plan well enough."

And that leads to a culture that is the exact opposite of CI/CD, fail early, fail often, rebase or reintegrate continuously.

Thus in the automotive SPICE and six sigma world it takes 2-3 years to replace an ECU with another one with sufficiently similar specs.

Also, they prioritize "economies of scale" over flexibility and time to market.

For example a "gateway controller", a router and switch, routing and switching between ethernet and CAN, with some spare CPU cycles for centralized functions? 2-3 years. Now let's say you need 3 million of these devices per year (Volkswagen group, Toyota, Stellantis each make ~10 million vehicles y/y), and you'll produce cars with that same device for 5 years? Then cost savings of 10$ per device are equal to 150 Mio bucks. As a supplier you'll happily put 20 people on saving those 10 bucks on the "bill of materials" --- not adding cool features, no, saving some RAM, CPU, ... the boring and non-innovative side of "economies of scale"

Now the device is cheaper but maxed out. So your OEM won't ship new functions. the OEM is also later to market. And the OEM can't replace the part as easily because the spare would have to be as damn dirt cheap as the original. Not alone would you have to redo all these micro optimizations --- the savings from the previous design wouldn't materialize against the lower volume any more.

And that is, in a nutshell, imnsho, why automotive asks for more of the old parts instead of switching to a new board design with a next-gen CPU...

To summarize: automotive deals time to market and flexibility for "economies of scale" and "automotive grade quality processes".

Contrast that to an OEM who thinks like a software CEO... the software CEO understands that the secret to high quality is in CI/CD with outstanding test and validation pipelines. You seek to change any part of your system just at marginal cost. And then you can replace some ECU within 6 months.

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