Radiation hardening is a completely different beast. I'm not aware of any radiation hardened chips under 180nm. They are frequently made on insulating layers like SOI and SOS, unlike other chips. Automotive chips are sometimes SOI, but not typically. Radiation hardened electronics often make use of bipolar transistors instead of FETs. Radiation hardened chips are often made on wide band gapped substrates like GaN instead of typical doped silicon. And finally they are usually protected by a shielding layer of borophosphosilicate or similar glass.
Now the more interesting question is you second one - can they perform adequately? With enough redundancy, probably. SpaceX is using a triple redundant computer setup (with each computer self-checking by running everything across two separate compute pipelines) that is made with regular COTS chips (possibly automotive) for a significant amount of their processing. They likely also make use of radiation-hardened chips for some mission critical things, but that's a trade secret. So there is definitely a place for well designed non-radiation-hardened chips in space.
I suspect that the radiation hardened chips SpaceX is using is the RAD750 which fits the noted specs: it can operate in a triple redundant configuration to handle data errors and fault tolerance. It is based upon the PowerPC 750 and is quite popular in this market segment. The PowerPC 750 and variants were quiet popular for automotive usage so porting the software between these platforms should be straight forward. The successor to the RAD750, the RAD5500 series, is available but I'm not of any implementation that has actually made it to orbit. The RAD5500 is noteworthy due to it being made on a 45 nm SOI process.
I know I am old school, but I want as few chips as possible in my car. I like it to be as analog as possible. No push button start, no electric parking break, no lane departure assist, no adaptive cruise control, ...
I know that self driving cars will be ubiquitous soon, and I am all for them... for everyone else. But for me I want to row my own gears! Manual cars may be disappearing, but not in my garage.
Problem is, it's all this half-way implementation of self driving that makes people complacent behind the wheel and think they no longer have to pay attention - the car will let me know if I need to do something. Right after you end up driving head on into oncoming traffic. If we had LESS of this prone to failure crap in cars, and if all cars were manual transmission, you'd have to DRIVE the car, and not have time to stare at your phone and text.
Will you keep your computer filled nightmares in your garage so those of us that know how to drive dont have to worry about your distracted head smashing into us?
Indeed. It's getting so difficult to find a car still offered with a manual gearbox. It may be taking a few more years, but we are reaching the point in Rush's Red Barchetta and the Road & Track story that inspired it.
Hardly anybody buys manual and they're slower, to boot (especially compared to a good DCT). I know a lot of people mourning the impending doom of manuals and half of them don't even own a MT, or own one classic/older model, and all their newer vehicles are automatic. Guess what, they pay attention to what people buy and as a result they don't want to spend the time and money developing and supporting manuals for new platforms anymore. Plus by law if you sell one, you have to supply parts and service for a certain number of years (depending where you live), which is another burden they don't want for a small percentage of vehicles.
The other bad news is that even without all those features, a modern vehicle would actually still have damn near the same number of chips. Plus having rare option(s) virtually always worsens parts availability (in the longer term) for the corresponding components and raises the prices for said components.
That is only in the USA, in the rest of the world there are far more Manuals than Automatics. Also many people, such as my self, wind up having to buy an automatic instead of a manual because the model we want is not available with a manual transmission, so they blows your whole "paying attention to what people are buying" argument since you can't buy what is not offered for sale.
I was all for old school muscle, had a '69 and '10 challenger. The maintenance on an EV is almost non existent. I have to look for something to do. Had Leaf for 4 years and only had to refill the winshield washer fluid. The Tesla i don't even have to tell you about. Even if the MCU crashes the car is perfectly drivable. I had it crash on me twice while parked, but could still drive. Can't really see much stats until it was booted back up, but only took about 20-30 seconds. Self driving i do not believe we are there yet, maybe 5 years. I don't use it, but I can see it being godsend for heavy traffic jams and long road trips with long stretches of boring highway.
I am sure auto makers CAN use very very small amount of chips / wires etc to make the vehicle and engine functional, NOT keep adding more and more
I am with you on this one, sometimes KISS method needs to apply, vehicles are one of these..should go hand in hand with also NOT making the lights laser burn your eyes from the socket bright on pretty much every damn vehicle on the road these days.
if above X "lumin" it should be auto nailed against the license...or at the very least, have a simple light sensor (buried somewhere cannot get damaged) that if it detects above X background bright will NOT allow the full "laser bright" lights to turn on....maybe they should go back to the NOT all-in-one headlamp assembly go back to where at least headlight and running are SEPARATE
No self driving cars for me thank you. I really like being able to go home and I really don't think any self driving car will make it to my house, especially in the winter. GPS systems all invariable insist on taking an unnavigable goat path to/from my house you you always have to ignore the GPS and self driving cars are not capable of doing that. GPS also takes you to the front of my house, which is about 100 ft down a cliff, and not the back where the garage is.
There is also a very steep section of road you have to climb that requires AWD in the winter (I have tried with RWD & RWD cars and been defeated, also had an AWD Subaru Legacy get defeated once), not sure how self driving car will handle that either, especially when the car starts sliding backwards and tilting sideways while the wheels spin to go forward.
There's a big difference between the reliability level of the components fabricated using this process, and the software that is written to execute on it. The problem here was the latter, not the former. Also, there was a procedure in place to deal with this condition. A step was missed, to the detriment of all on board. Granted, such a condition should never have been allowed to occur in the first place, but this was not a failure of the hardware itself because of some lack of quality in the process node used to make the chips. Aircraft standards are even HIGHER than this.
It seems as though GF has reduced its possibility of being in business by disregarding more advanced nodes. I don’t know if there are any automotive chips being produced by them now, but these new advanced seem to cut off any possibility of them doing so in the near future.
I remember when they announced that they would stick with advancing their current 14 and 12nm nodes, they said, or rather, the guy who controls them said, that it was time to start making a profit. But if they continue to fall further behind, they will have less business coming in.
Sure, can you point out the ones on 65nm, or maybe 45nm? I’m sure there must be a few, other than some analog. In a few years, 16, 14 and 12 will seem like 65 and 45 today. Even 32 isn’t around that much.
Will they get work? I suppose so. But big companies can afford to keep a depreciated plant around with older tech for clients that still need it. But to only have those plants isn’t good.
Most of your ethernet controllers, wifi radios, asmedia USB controllers, bmc modules and other ICs on your typical pcb are 65nm or 45nm. For example the Intel I219 gigabit ethernet controller found in a ton of current mainstream motherboards is 40nm. The only component on the board that is on a bleeding edge node is the cpu itself. Even Intel's PCH (chipset) is often 22nm for now. Or an older version of their 14nm.
Completely wrong here buddy. The bulk of automotive cameras (side mirror, backup cam, etc.) are built on 28, 45, and 65nm nodes. Memory controllers are built on 28/45nm mostly because yields are much much higher than a FinFET. 32nm and 28nm are grouped in most tech roadmaps, and frequently 32nm designs moved to 28nm and stayed there. RF is still mostly on 28nm, since the analog components don't scale down with the logic when moving to 14/16nm or below. Some designs are built on FinFET nodes as they are using advanced logic (such as 5G modems or base station SOCs)
Going below 12nm has not many advantages for automotive chips, except for advanced computer vision chips but their volume will remain low for at least another decade.
Sensors and power electronics hardly use what we may call advanced nodes, and the power consumption and lower chip sizes of <12nm nodes don't really matter for automotive infotainment or controller chips.
That’s for you to say, but it doesn’t seem true. If it were, these major companies wouldn’t be spending the huge amount of money on the 7nm node for this that they are spending. Smaller nodes mean more sophisticated chips, lower power chips, and very possibly, lower cost chips. All of that is at least as important in the automotive world as anywhere else.
Companies are chasing the bleeding edge because that is how technological progress works, but mostly because they have customers DEMANDING that research for mobile devices and CPUs. Automotive designs take a couple years to qualify, and then they have 10-20 year life spans at a minimum. if you think automotive is in the same dimension of development speed as mobile, you need to do some more research.
GF will gradually lose business - but in the meantime they are making profits. If they spent the money required to become competitive in 7nm, they would have gone bankrupt. Only 2 firms have enough business to make it economic to be a 7nm foundry TSMC and Samsung. GF is a tiddler compared to these two and could not afford the expenditure to keep up. (Intel will sooner or later get to a 7nm node out of necessity otherwise AMD will eat their business. However if AMD had not been successful with the Ryzen series then Intel might have stayed on 14nm for another decade rather than spend the multiple billions that 7nm requires.)
Eh? Intel tried its hand at being a foundry itself and the flagship process for that venture is (was?) 10 nm. The big Altera FPGAs were announced using it before Intel simply just bought Altera. Intel bought out several other firms looking to use them as a foundry. I have this nagging feeling that these were motivated to head off any sort of lawsuit for failure to deliver 10 nm on time. Regardless of the reasoning, Intel did have motivation to get 10 nm working as they had fab customers now who needed it.
Only minus 40 celsius... what happens to these chips at minus 60? The car does not work? There is chip warming system in the car? All in all lower than minus 40 is rare, but there Are areas where it will happen...
At -40C you probably run into various issues already if you don't have a heating system (for example, diesel will turn into a gel, and petrol might also start to get issues), and vehicles made for areas where this is common will probably use rather special setups.
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Jedibeeftrix - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
How much crossover in physical characteristics of chips made for automative purposes such as this an radiation hardened nodes for use in space?Could these chips perform quite adequately in low earth orbit (avoiding the Val-Alen belts ofc), with just a modicum on shielding...?
tecknohow - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
Radiation hardening is a completely different beast. I'm not aware of any radiation hardened chips under 180nm. They are frequently made on insulating layers like SOI and SOS, unlike other chips. Automotive chips are sometimes SOI, but not typically. Radiation hardened electronics often make use of bipolar transistors instead of FETs. Radiation hardened chips are often made on wide band gapped substrates like GaN instead of typical doped silicon. And finally they are usually protected by a shielding layer of borophosphosilicate or similar glass.Now the more interesting question is you second one - can they perform adequately? With enough redundancy, probably. SpaceX is using a triple redundant computer setup (with each computer self-checking by running everything across two separate compute pipelines) that is made with regular COTS chips (possibly automotive) for a significant amount of their processing. They likely also make use of radiation-hardened chips for some mission critical things, but that's a trade secret. So there is definitely a place for well designed non-radiation-hardened chips in space.
Kevin G - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
I suspect that the radiation hardened chips SpaceX is using is the RAD750 which fits the noted specs: it can operate in a triple redundant configuration to handle data errors and fault tolerance. It is based upon the PowerPC 750 and is quite popular in this market segment. The PowerPC 750 and variants were quiet popular for automotive usage so porting the software between these platforms should be straight forward. The successor to the RAD750, the RAD5500 series, is available but I'm not of any implementation that has actually made it to orbit. The RAD5500 is noteworthy due to it being made on a 45 nm SOI process.soliloquist - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
I know I am old school, but I want as few chips as possible in my car. I like it to be as analog as possible. No push button start, no electric parking break, no lane departure assist, no adaptive cruise control, ...I know that self driving cars will be ubiquitous soon, and I am all for them... for everyone else. But for me I want to row my own gears! Manual cars may be disappearing, but not in my garage.
Death666Angel - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
As long as you keep them in your garage and don't disturb everyone else with them, I'm all for it!rrinker - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
Problem is, it's all this half-way implementation of self driving that makes people complacent behind the wheel and think they no longer have to pay attention - the car will let me know if I need to do something. Right after you end up driving head on into oncoming traffic. If we had LESS of this prone to failure crap in cars, and if all cars were manual transmission, you'd have to DRIVE the car, and not have time to stare at your phone and text.Korguz - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
Death666angelthat makes no sense
TheinsanegamerN - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
Will you keep your computer filled nightmares in your garage so those of us that know how to drive dont have to worry about your distracted head smashing into us?rrinker - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
Indeed. It's getting so difficult to find a car still offered with a manual gearbox. It may be taking a few more years, but we are reaching the point in Rush's Red Barchetta and the Road & Track story that inspired it.Alexvrb - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
Hardly anybody buys manual and they're slower, to boot (especially compared to a good DCT). I know a lot of people mourning the impending doom of manuals and half of them don't even own a MT, or own one classic/older model, and all their newer vehicles are automatic. Guess what, they pay attention to what people buy and as a result they don't want to spend the time and money developing and supporting manuals for new platforms anymore. Plus by law if you sell one, you have to supply parts and service for a certain number of years (depending where you live), which is another burden they don't want for a small percentage of vehicles.The other bad news is that even without all those features, a modern vehicle would actually still have damn near the same number of chips. Plus having rare option(s) virtually always worsens parts availability (in the longer term) for the corresponding components and raises the prices for said components.
naris - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
That is only in the USA, in the rest of the world there are far more Manuals than Automatics. Also many people, such as my self, wind up having to buy an automatic instead of a manual because the model we want is not available with a manual transmission, so they blows your whole "paying attention to what people are buying" argument since you can't buy what is not offered for sale.Byte - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
I was all for old school muscle, had a '69 and '10 challenger. The maintenance on an EV is almost non existent. I have to look for something to do. Had Leaf for 4 years and only had to refill the winshield washer fluid. The Tesla i don't even have to tell you about. Even if the MCU crashes the car is perfectly drivable. I had it crash on me twice while parked, but could still drive. Can't really see much stats until it was booted back up, but only took about 20-30 seconds. Self driving i do not believe we are there yet, maybe 5 years. I don't use it, but I can see it being godsend for heavy traffic jams and long road trips with long stretches of boring highway.Dragonstongue - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
I am sure auto makers CAN use very very small amount of chips / wires etc to make the vehicle and engine functional, NOT keep adding more and moreI am with you on this one, sometimes KISS method needs to apply, vehicles are one of these..should go hand in hand with also NOT making the lights laser burn your eyes from the socket bright on pretty much every damn vehicle on the road these days.
if above X "lumin" it should be auto nailed against the license...or at the very least, have a simple light sensor (buried somewhere cannot get damaged) that if it detects above X background bright will NOT allow the full "laser bright" lights to turn on....maybe they should go back to the NOT all-in-one headlamp assembly go back to where at least headlight and running are SEPARATE
naris - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
No self driving cars for me thank you. I really like being able to go home and I really don't think any self driving car will make it to my house, especially in the winter. GPS systems all invariable insist on taking an unnavigable goat path to/from my house you you always have to ignore the GPS and self driving cars are not capable of doing that. GPS also takes you to the front of my house, which is about 100 ft down a cliff, and not the back where the garage is.There is also a very steep section of road you have to climb that requires AWD in the winter (I have tried with RWD & RWD cars and been defeated, also had an AWD Subaru Legacy get defeated once), not sure how self driving car will handle that either, especially when the car starts sliding backwards and tilting sideways while the wheels spin to go forward.
Duncan Macdonald - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
What a pity that Boeing did not bother with that level of safety requirements in the MCAS system on the 737 Max 8.rrinker - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
There's a big difference between the reliability level of the components fabricated using this process, and the software that is written to execute on it. The problem here was the latter, not the former. Also, there was a procedure in place to deal with this condition. A step was missed, to the detriment of all on board. Granted, such a condition should never have been allowed to occur in the first place, but this was not a failure of the hardware itself because of some lack of quality in the process node used to make the chips. Aircraft standards are even HIGHER than this.melgross - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
It seems as though GF has reduced its possibility of being in business by disregarding more advanced nodes. I don’t know if there are any automotive chips being produced by them now, but these new advanced seem to cut off any possibility of them doing so in the near future.I remember when they announced that they would stick with advancing their current 14 and 12nm nodes, they said, or rather, the guy who controls them said, that it was time to start making a profit. But if they continue to fall further behind, they will have less business coming in.
Death666Angel - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
Pretty sure most ICs in the world are on nodes other than the leading edge.melgross - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
Sure, can you point out the ones on 65nm, or maybe 45nm? I’m sure there must be a few, other than some analog. In a few years, 16, 14 and 12 will seem like 65 and 45 today. Even 32 isn’t around that much.Will they get work? I suppose so. But big companies can afford to keep a depreciated plant around with older tech for clients that still need it. But to only have those plants isn’t good.
Ej24 - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
Most of your ethernet controllers, wifi radios, asmedia USB controllers, bmc modules and other ICs on your typical pcb are 65nm or 45nm. For example the Intel I219 gigabit ethernet controller found in a ton of current mainstream motherboards is 40nm. The only component on the board that is on a bleeding edge node is the cpu itself. Even Intel's PCH (chipset) is often 22nm for now. Or an older version of their 14nm.melgross - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
I’m willing to bet that will change in another two years. Don’t you?FullmetalTitan - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Completely wrong here buddy.The bulk of automotive cameras (side mirror, backup cam, etc.) are built on 28, 45, and 65nm nodes.
Memory controllers are built on 28/45nm mostly because yields are much much higher than a FinFET.
32nm and 28nm are grouped in most tech roadmaps, and frequently 32nm designs moved to 28nm and stayed there.
RF is still mostly on 28nm, since the analog components don't scale down with the logic when moving to 14/16nm or below. Some designs are built on FinFET nodes as they are using advanced logic (such as 5G modems or base station SOCs)
Arsenica - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
Going below 12nm has not many advantages for automotive chips, except for advanced computer vision chips but their volume will remain low for at least another decade.Sensors and power electronics hardly use what we may call advanced nodes, and the power consumption and lower chip sizes of <12nm nodes don't really matter for automotive infotainment or controller chips.
melgross - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
That’s for you to say, but it doesn’t seem true. If it were, these major companies wouldn’t be spending the huge amount of money on the 7nm node for this that they are spending. Smaller nodes mean more sophisticated chips, lower power chips, and very possibly, lower cost chips. All of that is at least as important in the automotive world as anywhere else.FullmetalTitan - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Companies are chasing the bleeding edge because that is how technological progress works, but mostly because they have customers DEMANDING that research for mobile devices and CPUs. Automotive designs take a couple years to qualify, and then they have 10-20 year life spans at a minimum. if you think automotive is in the same dimension of development speed as mobile, you need to do some more research.Duncan Macdonald - Monday, October 14, 2019 - link
GF will gradually lose business - but in the meantime they are making profits. If they spent the money required to become competitive in 7nm, they would have gone bankrupt. Only 2 firms have enough business to make it economic to be a 7nm foundry TSMC and Samsung. GF is a tiddler compared to these two and could not afford the expenditure to keep up. (Intel will sooner or later get to a 7nm node out of necessity otherwise AMD will eat their business. However if AMD had not been successful with the Ryzen series then Intel might have stayed on 14nm for another decade rather than spend the multiple billions that 7nm requires.)Kevin G - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
Eh? Intel tried its hand at being a foundry itself and the flagship process for that venture is (was?) 10 nm. The big Altera FPGAs were announced using it before Intel simply just bought Altera. Intel bought out several other firms looking to use them as a foundry. I have this nagging feeling that these were motivated to head off any sort of lawsuit for failure to deliver 10 nm on time. Regardless of the reasoning, Intel did have motivation to get 10 nm working as they had fab customers now who needed it.haukionkannel - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
Only minus 40 celsius... what happens to these chips at minus 60? The car does not work? There is chip warming system in the car?All in all lower than minus 40 is rare, but there Are areas where it will happen...
nevcairiel - Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - link
At -40C you probably run into various issues already if you don't have a heating system (for example, diesel will turn into a gel, and petrol might also start to get issues), and vehicles made for areas where this is common will probably use rather special setups.