Auto chip aging accelerates in hot climates
semiengineering.com
semiengineering.com
Edit: read the article, this seems to be what the article suggests as well
Most IC designers tend to design for the 100k hours at absolute worst case conditions. What is known as PVT: worst case process, voltage, and temperature corners.
Assuming they do that, the likelihood that electromigration actually being the issue is not a concern. Designers can mess up, but generally they don't want to do this... especially in automotive. Auto manufacturers will ruin them if they determine there's a design flaw like this.
Do you want your ABS controller to be seated like that? Seems like a genuinely terrible idea.
That is actually the hard part, odds are the chips inside are not longer made. When making ABS controllers the OEM guesses how many replacements will be needed and buys that many extra to put in a environment controlled warehouse - when they guess wrong they run out and if the parts inside are no longer made the rest of us are out of luck. If the chips inside are still made the OEM will generally order more (if they run out before the expected date that implies there is a lot of demand so it is worth ordering more).
The expected date above is for normal care lifespan. If you are a collector good luck.
You obviously can't expect them to support models forever. Even right now their suppliers keep open ancient manufacturing lines for the ancient chips used in these controllers.
>If you are a collector good luck.
Good thing that is a small minority of, usually well off, people.
How big do you want your automotive-grade chips to be?
And we should trust you because...? I wouldn't trust you because of the way you insult professional technicians that work on your car, and obviously know little about the profession.
That, and if you think replacing these parts would involve soldering and not a complete module replacement, I wouldn't trust your opinion on anything electronics-related, either.
They existed because the manufacturers would not always release the factory schematics or service manuals for mass-produced consumer products.
This proliferated once consumerism & disposable-ism really took off, before that most electronics came with a schematic, but it was still not often up to the standards of places like HP or Tektronix.
So Sams took what info they could get and reverse-engineered the rest as they tore down and scrutinized new equipment to produce these fairly standardized publications that were available by subscription to independent repair operators, covering each popular model from many different manufacturers as they emerged in the marketplace.
A lot of the repair operators were very familiar with gear like HP and Tek and so was Sams.
Most of them had successfully leveraged that kind of top documentation and serviceability to have materially contributed to the winning of World War II. Slouches they were not.
There was a preference not to want to settle for less in consumer electronics so they published their own to make up the difference. If the skills are there why not use them? Especially when a failure is usually only one or a small number of the most common dirt-cheap components that need to be replaced to fix.
Which is what electronics servicing is supposed to be all about from the beginning.
I know it's not the beginning any more but still there was a time when the pros had in the back of their mind the kind of things it might take to win World War III, more so than now.
With people like that around you didn't need right-to-repair laws to be enacted, the whole country was still aware of the benefit of field repair if not improvisation.
All of the overseas Communists were certainly not going to sleep on it.
You could go with a socket-less design, but then you need expensive equipment and a highly skilled technician to do the replacement. You still lose the conformal coating, as such coated boards are not very repairable in the general case.
For as much as you'd pay for a replacement chip and labor, a new PCB costs ten times less.
Component level repair is never an economical option in this scenario. It only works out if replacement parts are unavailable.
This is the problem. We know that the number of problems with silicon goes up as the feature size goes down. The older nodes are much more reliable. Not putting something on an AIC is often easier to fix, too.
The solution is to keep cars simpler so that they can use robust nodes. as a consumer, by the dumbest car that you can buy. You also want this little proprietary addons as possible so you don’t have to replace a whole module because a chip fails.
I’d like to see a whole, new, auto company funded the bed makes nice cars that are easy to repair with minimal electronics. Maybe customizable with different skins on the outside. Open interfaces in format so that they’re easy to customize on the inside.
Doesn’t sound too bad?
30 - (30.1 - 1) = 26.
Doing that again for the next year: 26 - (26.1 - 1) = 22.4.
So you now have 22.4 years of life vs an expected 28.
etc...
That said, when someone says "it reduces the lifespan by 10%", I'm a bit skeptical of the math. Either they are not properly testing it, or the temperatures are exceeding silicon parameters.
A) redundant, a chip failure will not cause the car to brick/be un-drivable, spacecraft have been doing this for decades...
and
B) FUCKING REPAIRABLE
“most driver assistance features are disabled, including rearview cameras, forward collision warning and blind spot warning, GPS navigation, and range estimations”
https://jalopnik.com/tesla-s-brand-new-cars-not-drivable-bec...
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Tesla-HW4-computers-are-failin...
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-scrambles-to-fix-ai...
For other makes of cars third party scan tools work pretty well at diagnostics.
Electronic parts tend to go out of production. If nobody makes the failed chip anymore what can you do to repair it? If you can get the correct chip we can put the software back on it (well good luck getting that, but it is possible), but all too often parts are not available at any price.
How would they know this unless they were already making them barely good enough to last beyond the warranty period in northern climates?
Or maybe one day the only vintage cars will be same ones there are now, only the ones made without chips at all might be capable of operating beyond 30 to 50 years ever again.
The people up north may have fair warning decades later when the collectors having something like a mint 2025 Mercedes in places like Texas or Florida start having theirs die for this reason.
Verses a carburetor? Have you worked on engines before?
The ECU has fairly standardized interfaces, mostly CAN or just simple switching circuits on or off. You can just get a replacement ECU. These replacement ECUs generally don't do things like using the O2 sensor to adjust the fueling, so they can burn dirtier than the original ECU.
CAN is just the physical and framing layer. The data that goes over it is a whole different matter, and it's proprietary to every vendor, incompatible and generally undocumented.
For a lot of cars you can't even swap the exact same ECU between vehicles (due to bullshit like the VIN being written into it for no reason, and often no official way to change that other than "buy a new module" - so you have to hack around with reverse engineering & EEPROM programmers), let alone mix and match completely different parts.
There is good reason for this: theft protection. A long known crime model is the "chop shop" where they tow away a car, then cut it up for parts. Because the VIN is in the ECU a chop shop has less incentive to exist since there is less money in it.
It does of course make legitimate repairs harder, and probably there should be a process to write a new VIN in - but it should only be available to someone who can verify the ECU wasn't stolen (which isn't free).
Just search for "aftermarket ECU", you'll find lots of them; generally for high-performance cars that gearheads want to soup up further, but the same basic principle applies to most ECUs.
My son drives a 1996 Buck Park Avenue which dates from the beginning of the ODB II era. We got it for about $4k but it has been through a few difficult repairs that took my son or auto techs a while to figure out. For instance the immobilizer system failed with the result that we couldn't start the car, it took a tech a lot of investigation to realize this, but once he did it wasn't hard to disable.
Overall if the car has some sort of devices that limits, mitigates, or eliminates emissions then any modification to it can be considered a defeat device
I've an '81 VW van in my driveway that begs to differ. It's got a bad idle stabilizer. The vehicle won't start unless that electronic idle stabilizer is bypassed. It runs fine in the bypass state, and good thing, because NOS parts ran out a few years ago. There might be efforts to create a clone (haven't checked thesamba.com in a while). I'm sure a clone is doable by someone that paid more attention in electronics class than I did, but no one is going to pop one out on their garage lathe.
And that's just the electronics. It has mechanical fuel injection (fuck you, Bosch), but good luck making injectors in your home workshop. I'll not start on suspension parts whose manufacturing require a far larger hydraulic press than anyone is likely to have in their garage.
Sorry to be a stick in the ass, but RTFA. The Arrhenius equation is mentioned and is quite interesting.
The work of Arrhenius I do remember from 1970 myself, and it has been a consideration over these decades, not only with the electronics but the chemicals professionally since then.
But I haven't stepped into a fab lab since the early 1970's, I know they've come a long way though.
I was wondering if much theory was involved or actual lifetimes have begun to be exceeded.
I do remember cars from before, during, and after the arrival of silicon semiconductors, and then chips myself. It did not appear to be a very ideal progression, nor as logical as it could have been. That just makes it more difficult to arrive at very accurate predictions.
Did I mention that the web page is not open to the general public?
Not that I actually expected anybody to read the article to me ;)
Having lots of comments are more informative regardless, and naturally sometimes more helpful than others.
So everybody wins.
[1]: https://www.microsemi.com/document-portal/doc_view/124041-ca...
Life time estimation for parts has existed for over 100 years. It is not a novel science.
Also a fun little exercise, what do car companies sell, besides new cars? That is right, they all sell used cars. For most car companies used cars are a huge part of their businesses model, their ideal customer buys new cars often AND sells their old car to the manufacturer, so they can sell it again.
>Or maybe one day the only vintage cars will be same ones there are now, only the ones made without chips at all might be capable of operating beyond 30 to 50 years ever again.
All cars are made to die, there is no alternative. If the owner wants to avoid that, they will have to do constant maintenance. Vintage cars do not exist because rust didn't exist in the 1990s, but because they were extremely well cared for and had significant replacements.
Many of the parts of the car are bought from a third party who gives a discount to the OEM because they can sell replacement parts later. (put my alternator in your car, and when it wears out in 5-10 years they will buy a new one from me)