Solving automotive challenges with Electronics

The automotive industry is challenged by strong and often contradictory forces: environment protection, sustainability, safety, quality, fun to drive, fashion, comfort, and of course cost effectiveness. The integration of new functions and features in to the car are often enabled by electronics. This holds true for all the major application fields; whether powertrain, safety management, body and convenience or infotainment. Electronics is giving new opportunities to improve energy efficiency and CO₂ reduction. The domain approach allows consolidation of functions into fewer electronic control super units. The automotive industry is intelligently using standardization as a means to manage the increasing vehicle complexity. The successful implementation and the high penetration of car electronics across all different vehicle classes are strongly dependent on three major aspects: productivity, quality and innovation. These parameters affect all parties of the automotive electronics value chain, with an especially significant contribution from the semiconductor industry. There are many important questions that have to be dealt with in this context: how can a continuous productivity improvement be achieved to support further penetration of car electronics where Moore´s law is slowing down? How can the component quality provide the desired zero defect rate when the complexity of automotive electronic systems is so rapidly increasing? How can innovations be guaranteed considering the very tough financial boundaries on the component level? And how can automotive long-term product delivery be fulfilled? The presenter will propose answers to these questions from the perspective of Europe´s largest automotive semiconductor supplier.