Engineers are scrambling to ensure that autonomous vehicles will remain safe even as the chips used within them succumb to natural deterioration over time.
IC Aging and Self-Driving Car
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake?
All integrated circuits age and change their behavior over time. But ADAS and autonomous-driving electronics demand highly complex chips built on the most advanced IC processes — those with the tiniest structures vulnerable to aging effects, and for which scant historical data exists. Preventing chip aging from leading to traffic catastrophe is becoming a team effort of process engineers, chip designers and automotive-systems experts.