Automobiles – Furious pace of Electronics Adoption

It gives me great pleasure to share some of my thoughts with you through this column. In this inaugural blog, I would like to touch upon the automotive segment. Hope you concur with my observations!!

Automobiles – Furious pace of Electronics Adoption

Automobiles are becoming an inevitable part of our lives. The affordability in the developing countries like ours is enabling the demand for automobiles. The negative impact is the chaos on the roads!! This will also invariably lead to a corresponding increase in air pollution.

Automobiles seem likely to continue adopting electronics at a furious pace for some time to come, be it a motor bike or a transportation truck.

Three main factors influence the adoption of electronics in automobiles:

1. Stiffer environmental regulations – restrictions on emissions
   
2. Safety and comfort of passengers
   
3. Infotainment
   

Stiffer emission regulations are leading to rapid adoption of hybrid vehicles, which have electrical power trains, onboard motors and onboard re-chargeable batteries. The adoption of Electric Vehicles is also growing in the small and mid size segments. Inverters, motor control and chargers all form the electronic chain here. Automobile manufacturers are developing sophisticated control systems to boost performance and energy regeneration efficiency of batteries. The use of 8 and 16 bit processors that had traditionally dominated the automobile segment is fading away and powerful 32 bit microcontrollers are increasingly becoming dominant.

There is lot of work going on in the Safety and comfort segments too.

Automobile segment also integrates various technologies that have dominated the traditional consumer world. The convergence of Video, Voice and Data is already taking place and next generation cellular communications are appearing as an integral part.

Needless to say, the rapid adoption of new technologies, importance of safety and comfort, in-cabin entertainment – all of them point towards a steep rise in the usage of semiconductors – making the advanced features available in an affordable manner.

However, there are also issues! Today, some of the high end cars use as much as 70 ‘intelligent’ ICs! These ICs along with various ‘gadgets’ they control need and consume lot of power. Will this warrant an additional battery? I won’t be surprised! Do you think this will become a problem? Should the ICs used in automobiles become ultra low power – or atleast low power devices? Do you think this will impact the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol – we are one among the countries who have ratified it?

Let me know your views and thoughts. I will meet you again next week.