electronic products. One of the main reasons is the use of automotive-grade electronic components. What kind of electronic components are automotive-grade components? This article explains the difference between the application of electronic components in automobiles and the application of general consumer electronics.
Environmental requirements
Temperature: The operating temperature requirements of automotive electronics are relatively wide, and there are different requirements according to different installation positions, but they are generally higher than the requirements of civilian products.
For example:
Around the engine: -40℃-150℃;
Passenger cabin: -40℃-85℃;
Civil products: 0℃-70℃.
Other environmental requirements eg humidity, mold, dust, water, EMC, and harmful gas erosion are often higher than consumer electronics requirements.
Vibration and shocks
When a car works in a moving environment, it will encounter more vibrations and shocks related to many products. This requirement may be much higher than for products placed at home.
Reliability
1. Design life: The general design life of a car is about 15 years and 200,000 kilometers, which is much longer than the life requirements of consumer electronic products.
2. Under the same reliability requirements, the more components and links the system contain, the higher the reliability requirements for the components are. At present, the degree of electronics in the car is very high. From the powertrain to the braking system, a large number of electronic devices are installed, and each device is composed of many electronic components. If they are simply regarded as a series relationship, then to ensure the complete reliability of the whole vehicle, the requirements for each part of the system are very high, that is why the requirements of auto parts are often described in PPM ( one in a million) level.
Conformance requirements
Today the automobile industry has entered an era of mass production. A car manufacturer can make millions of cars per year, so the requirements for the consistency of product quality are very high. This was quite challenging for semiconductor materials in the early years.
After all, the consistency of processing such as diffusion in the semiconductor production is difficult to control, and the performance of the produced products is easy to be discrete. In the early stage, it could only be accomplished by aging tests and screening. Now, with the continuous improvement of the process, the consistency has been greatly improved. For complex automotive products, it is definitely unacceptable that components with poor consistency lead to potential safety hazards in the entire vehicle.
Here are a few more requirements:
Manufacturing process
The requirements of the manufacturing process of automobile products, although the parts of automobiles are constantly developing towards miniaturization and light weight, but compared with consumer products, they have buffers in terms of volume and power consumption. In general larger packages are used to ensure sufficient mechanical strength and conforms to the manufacturing processes of major automotive suppliers.
Product life cycle
Although the price of automobile products has been decreasing in recent years, the automobile is still a durable and large-scale commodity, and it is necessary to maintain the supply capacity of after-sales parts for a long time. At the same time, the development of an auto part requires a lot of verification work, and the verification work brought by the replacement of components is also huge. Therefore, vehicle manufacturers and parts suppliers also need to maintain stable supply for a long time.
Standard
It is really complicated to meet the requirements of automotive products, and the above requirements are for automotive parts, for electronic components, it is a more complicated system. How to convert the requirements into electronic components becomes very difficult. To solve this problem, some standards are raised, and the most recognized is the AEC standard:
AEC Q100 Requirements for Active Device Components
AEC Q200 Requirements for Passive Device Components
Some people may say that there are still many corporate standards of OEMs. The OEMs do have a standard for general reliability requirements, but it examines a complete vehicle assembly (a system of electronic components) rather than the electronic components that make up those components (eg resistors, capacitors, transistors, chips, etc.), Although its requirements can be used as reference for the selection of lower-level components, it is still inappropriate as an electronic component test.
Disadvantages of using automotive-grade parts
First of all, it is expensive, with high system requirements, high development and verification costs, and low output, resulting in a much higher cost than consumer electronics. The relatively high threshold also makes for more sales premiums.
The second disadvantage is the difficulty of selection. Nowadays there are many solutions for products with the same function, and the complexity may vary greatly, but sometimes in order to meet the requirements of vehicle regulations, some highly integrated components have to be abandoned.
Another obvious disadvantage is that some products are outdated in technology, and a large number of verification work affects the speed of new products to market. At the same time, the general strategy of chip manufacturers is to hope that the product will be matured in the consumer electronics market before applying the product to the car market.
Risks to use non-vehicle-grade electronic components in the car
This question is really complicated and can be answered from several aspects:
1. It is just that the relevant certification has not been obtained, but in fact, the performance and reliability of the product meet the requirements, and have also been verified by a large number of applications. If this is the case, the risk is relatively small.
2. The relationship between components and systems is important. The performance and reliability of the system are formed by the next-level electronic components, so under the same design, the use of non-vehicle-regulated components will definitely be worse. However, a good design can reduce the performance requirements of the components. If a protection measure is well designed and the component failure can have a slight impact on the system, it is possible to use non-vehicle components to make better products.
Due to the limitations of current technology, not every electronic component that needs to be used in a car can meet the so-called car regulations. But in order to realize certain functions in the car, these components must be used. This situation can be divided into two categories:
a. The safety requirements of this function are high, and deviations cannot be accepted
Example: E-CALL function of emergency call, in order to ensure this function, it is necessary to install a backup battery for the device. And this function is related to life safety, according to the ASILI (ISO26262) rating of some companies, it is required to reach the B level.
However it’s difficult for batteries to maintain high performance at -40 degrees. Therefore, the solution of some companies is to wrap the heating resistance wire on the battery, and heat it at low temperature to ensure the performance. At this time, the standard of a single component is considered unqualified, but as a component assembly, it can meet the standard requirements of the car factory. This also shows the relationship between the OEM’s corporate standards and component standards.
b. This function generally does not involve security, and it can be considered to accept deviations
Such as the LCD screen of the entertainment system. Both the response and optical performance may be decreased at low temperatures. But this situation is accepted by some engineers.
GAAT makes a full range of environmental and reliability testing equipment for both automotive parts as well as automotive grade chips. We have served a number of renowned car markers as well as their associate components suppliers such as BYD, Tesla, GHAC, Great Wall, GTMC, etc. Please check our product pages for the equipment you want!
