The Big Automotive Semiconductor Problem

let me ask you something you probably have heard all the news about this or that car factor is shutting down because of the global chip shortage that nobody can get the car they want because of a tiny little chip and you might be wondering when did semiconductors matter so much to today's vehicles why do we need to turn our cars into computers why can't things just be simple and what are all these electronics actually doing for our cars in this video we're going to go into the automotive supply chain and they're semiconductors the specific focus will be on conventional cars but if this video does well enough perhaps we can do a version for electric and autonomous vehicles but first let me talk about the asian armature newsletter if you subscribe to the channel you should also sign up for the newsletter read the full scripts to older videos with additional commentary after the fact you can find the link to the newsletter in the video description below or you can just go to agenometry.com as of right now you can expect a new newsletter every thursday at 1am taiwan time all right back to the show now before we start i want to note something i'm not a car guy living in taiwan i don't even own a car and i am a stereotypically bad driver automobiles are a massive field and as always generalizations must be made and exceptions will always abound so keep that in mind our story begins in 1908 with the ford model t a major landmark in the history of automotive vehicles cars then were entirely made up of mechanics gods in his heaven all's right with the world shortly thereafter electric light bulbs began showing up in headlamps and starter motors replace hand cranks this was the first piece of electronics incorporated into a vehicle but other than that cars remain mostly mechanical objects into the 1950s with the invention of new microelectronics technology and larger batteries car makers started adding automotive computers into their vehicles in the late 1960s the first usage of such was for a fuel injection system by bosch for a 1968 volkswagen car then in the late 1960s and 70s car manufacturers started widely adopting electronics for the purpose of controlling the air-to-fuel ratio electronic fuel injection was a major breakthrough and would lead to the wide usage of electronic control units or ecu's the 1980s then saw an influx of electronics into your cars digital meter systems information displays airbag deployment systems and anti-lock brake systems all of these are today possible because of vehicle micro electronics and their semiconductors today semiconductors and micro electronics are thoroughly permeated throughout your conventional internal combustion cars and the trend has only accelerated in recent years modern high-end cars have over 100 electronic control units or ecu's running 100 million lines of code to compare as of 2020 windows has about 55 million lines of code and mac os 87 million lines the f-35 fighter jet has just 35 million lines google however has them all beat with 2 billion lines of code across their various services so that's nice electronic wiring alone is estimated to add 45 to 65 pounds to each vehicle micro electronics make up a significant percentage of a vehicle's total cost and the number is growing estimates find that number to be as high as 50 percent by 2030. semiconductors also help power the various sensors that exist within your car pressure acceleration power and magnetic sensors they all depend on semiconductors without them you and the ecu's operating your car are running blind the reasons for the semiconductor invasion have to do with steadily increasing industry demands to improve vehicle performance fuel economy emissions safety and comfort basically every part of what makes a car worth owning and driving the fact is that electronics exists because mechanics alone have not been able to meet the requirements that manufacturers need them to by intertwining the two the final product can perform so much better than the either of them can by themselves for instance let us talk about emissions and fuel efficiency controlling engine performance and emissions were the first big reasons why electronics started to show up in automotive vehicles the killer app engines work by combining air and gasoline and combusting them push down on the throttle and you're essentially asking to feed the engine more air to combust cars emit exhaust because this combustion reaction is not perfect accordingly exhaust is made up of carbon monoxide and various nitrogen oxides and unburnt hydrocarbons in the late 1960s and 70s policymakers passed new regulations for vehicle exhaust and fuel economy in response to health and environmental issues from excessive vehicle pollution the government tests these cars by putting them on a treadmill simulating various trips and measuring the emissions 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 with a micro computer-powered ecu automakers found that they can now carefully regulate the amount of fuel fed into the engine so that it properly matches with the air intake furthermore and this matters more than you think they can implement the same ecu across all of their vehicles suvs and sedans alike to gain advantages of scale and save on cost what started out as a separate subsystem for regulating these functions eventually evolved into an integrated digital system today you can argue that your belching disgusting dinosaur burning car engine is as digital as your slick glass iphone today people like their cars to be safe feels like an important prerequisite over time automakers found that they can deploy electronics to help make their products safer to not only protect their occupants in case of an accident but also to prevent them from ever happening for instance the simple airbag simple in concept but has it turned out extremely difficult to implement the first airbags introduced in the 1970s operated with electromechanical switches this is how it works normally the switch is open but when deceleration forces get very high it closes once it closes the completed switch is now able to send an electric current to the airbag igniter to ignite the airbag this took about 30 to 40 milliseconds to deploy which sounds fast but this turned out to be insufficient no i'm being euphemistic a lot of people still died in car crashes as it turns out 40 milliseconds is fine for a 15 mile per hour collision into a frontal barrier the requirement is about 50 milliseconds but the same type collision at 35 miles per hour needed a deployment of 18 milliseconds to save the life of its passengers and electromechanical switches were not fast enough for this today ecu's are capable of constantly monitoring vehicle speed and deceleration from various angles then they can use algorithms to accordingly adjust airbag deployment and inflation furthermore they can incorporate data from gyroscope to determine if the car is going to roll over the ecu and its algorithms can then decide to also deploy the side airbags titan seat belts and more this has offered significant safety benefits and saved countless lives let us go to the aforementioned ecu the systems overseeing all of these functions modern vehicles have up to 150 of them and they are responsible for controlling the various systems and subsystems within the car it seems to be an ecu for everything i already mentioned their role in helping engines regulate their emissions and fuel efficiency as well as controlling the airbags for safety but there are also ecu's for the brakes powertrain adaptive cruise control electronic stability control and power steering i won't talk about all of those here's one that i do want to talk about ecu's that control the doors the door control unit or dcu they help roll the windows up or down they deal with the child lock safety features driver door switch pads where you can control the rest of the car's windows and global open close functionality your door would not work anywhere near as well without that dcu and it's kind of funny because when i was a kid i always thought that it worked because of long wires and little elves ecu's have come a long way since intervention over 30 years ago their functionality and complexity have greatly advanced despite this to this day they still largely work the same way at the heart of it the ecu is a simple thing hardware on a pcb running low-level software it has sensors control circuits a power source and an actuator driver a component which is responsible for moving another mechanism here's how it all works conceptually sensors feed data on things like the crankshaft airflow or temperature into input processing circuits the control circuits today would be a microcomputer with a cpu memory timer in i o receives data from these circuits they decide a proper output which is then fed into output processing circuits which then go into your actuator the drive then performs the actual action required for proper operation within the ecu's themselves are microcomputers and the semiconductors that run them the semiconductors that operate these electronics are different from the types that go into your computer or mobile one of the defining differences has to do with the harsh operating conditions this is not exactly the surface of venus but conditions are not cushy at all temperatures can reach 257 degrees fahrenheit in the engine compartment or negative 40 degrees fahrenheit in the winter rapid temperature swings can cause either the packaging or the chip itself to delaminate or even crack under the strain relative humidity can be from 60 to 90 percent this can lead to moisture issues a common point of failure you don't need a wild imagination to visualize how water and moisture can finagle with a semiconductor voltages from the battery can come unevenly and wildly fluctuate these can cause damage to the pins and bonding another common point of failure and then there is the turbulence from vibrations 50gs 10x the consumer requirement you have to make sure that a rough speed bump does not cause your car to break down another unique concern from these semiconductors has to do with their reliability automotive suppliers require 20-year duration lives twice that of what is required in consumer markets the way these systems are integrated within the car they're not particularly easy to replace and a driver might engage a break tens of thousands of times over the lifespan of a car it is necessary to ensure that the semiconductors running the brake ecu work every time all the time this is all on top of the ordinary business requirements of being a component supplier to a big rich company always have to have better performance more memory zero defects low power consumption and ever lower prices oh and it has to be done yesterday the niche aspects of these ecus and their semiconductors can cause problems when their supply gets disrupted for instance in march 2011 a major earthquake hit japan toyota motors japanese factories survived the initial quake just fine but the suppliers were hit bad and saw their production disrupted in april 2011 toyota's car production levels fell by up to 78 from the previous year when their parts inventories came up empty sounds familiar toyota initially did not even know what it was missing it took a week to inventory the 500 parts from 200 locations that it needed to finish its cars they include rubber bits and the like but the most prominently missing components were the semiconductors for their ecu's the company had diligently diversified its first tier ecu suppliers over the years first tier meaning the suppliers they buy directly from in 1992 74 of its supply came from a single company denso but by 2007 they reduced that to 47 percent mission accomplished right as it turns out both denso and the other first tier suppliers kahin and hitachi automotive all depended on a single semiconductor company renesas electronics one of the company's plants in naka had been responsible for 15 percent of total capacity and was severely damaged it took about three months for them to get back to speed partly by tapping emergency capacity from various independent foundries doubling their contribution from 10 to 20 percent the automotive ecu makers personally oversee and certify the production of their semiconductors and foundries cannot easily change their lines to accommodate this exact sort of situation where a company thought their first tier suppliers were diversified but as it turns out they're all incestuously dependent on a single core supplier has happened more than a few times with icing seiki's karya plant in 1997 with rican's kashiwasaki plant in 2007 and so on i talked about it in a previous video about tsmc's earthquake threats and judging by how the situation keeps happening over and over again around the world it makes me think that companies are more willing to accept the significant but intermittent risks of this centralization rather than eat the substantial costs of true diversification so in conclusion why can't a car just be simple asking the question i think goes to show just how well the electronics have worked out it works so well that people do not even know it is working so well for them 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 they combine knowledge from across dozens of technologies and disciplines to make for a smooth wonderful drive every day for years on end over time this has also required an increasing degree of specialization to allow these cars to perform so well and so reliably and this has created situations where a single point of failure or overload can cause knock-on effects that cascade around the entire world alright that's it for tonight thanks for watching if you enjoyed the video consider subscribing the feed will show you a bunch of other videos from this channel that might fit your interest want to send me an email drop me a line at john asianometry.com i love reading your emails introduce yourself suggest a topic or more until next time i'll see you guys later

Channel: Asianometry

Views: 136,072

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Id: VjggV6j9NNg

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021