Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#31

Post by echelon » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

schiffern wrote: post #7

> “We were able to substitute alternative chips, and then write the firmware in a matter of weeks,” Musk said. “It’s not just a matter of swapping out a chip; you also have to rewrite the software.” https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22595060/tesla-chip-short...

Why did car companies allow themselves to make such a strategic mistake? Shouldn't they be on a standard microcontroller architecture?

Why not even use ARM, X86, etc? It'd save them money at this point. And there wouldn't be a supply risk.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#32

Post by mkr-hn » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 3:30 PM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #11

Admittedly it was a long time ago, but I worked in the semi industry and this isn't how things were done. We manufactured batches of totally obsolete EOLed devices for various customers when they had sufficient volume. Devices that are in volume production (e.g. for cars) are carefully managed by people who do nothing but ensure that they're available in the right place at the right time in the right volume. In order…

The customers screwed up the forecast. That's a huge part of the problem. They assumed the pandemic would kill demand and cancelled orders, but it didn't, and the cancelled capacity was already sold to someone else.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#33

Post by wcunning » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 3:30 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #4

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28709481 > The aspect of the problem not talked about is that a lot of automotive chips are really, really old. > And they are old, because of many certification requirements set partially by the industry, and a few odd governments. > In reality, most of them are both less reliable, and harder to work with in comparison to open market parts. > The only two things I seen chips with…

Window controls are safety regulated modules in modern vehicles. They detect the closing force and reverse direction off the required motor torque exceeds av threshold so that you can’t accidentally or intentionally choke someone with the windows. This feature is required by standards bodies and some regulators.

Why not put those smarts in one big module, say the Body Control Module which is always huge and already gets redesigned and uses more expensive, smaller feature chips anyway you ask? Well, we need to run a bunch of wires to the door, several for the switch, power and grind and Hall effect sensor for the motor and we need to account for the noise and power loss on the long wire run because as a safety feature the sensing has to be ASIL compliant to high fault tolerance. Turns out that that length of wire is several dollars more than putting the module in the door… These things are all done for a reason and the automotive engineers aren’t solely stuck in the old ways. They’re frequently penny pinched to death, but if you look at the constraints they’re doing their best.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#34

Post by baybal2 » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #29

schiffern wrote: post #7

> “We were able to substitute alternative chips, and then write the firmware in a matter of weeks,” Musk said. “It’s not just a matter of swapping out a chip; you also have to rewrite the software.” https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22595060/tesla-chip-short...

As far as I can tell, Tesla plays fast and loose, treating their product like a manufacturer of consumer electronics and not a manufacturer of a dangerous and durable good. That obviously allows them to out-compete other auto manufacturers who are more aware of things like product liability. See the Toyota accelerator-gate lawsuits. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic... : > However, on…

It is very troubling development when doing something so trivial even requires a computer.

That's a matter readily solved by a PID controller made of a few dozen 74XXX parts. Possibly made n-times redundant.

Even a more fancy LP solver probably wouldn't need a fully fledged computer.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#35

Post by im_down_w_otp » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #19

baybal2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM M family cores can run each other's code more or less. Only the libraries for I/O need to be rewritten. In some cases, there are drop in replacements (Gigadevices STM32 clones)

Are there even any ARM Cortex-M chips that are ASIL-B rated or better?

Looks like the Cortex-R52 and Cortex-R5, a CPU and MCU, respectively both have been ASIL-D (the highest rating) qualified. Which is fantastic frankly. There's a bunch of legacy PPC, MIPS, and TriCore tech that's just miserable to work with because of their ancient and/or bespoke & proprietary toolchains. So, really the automotive industry lacks excuses that I would buy for why they're not moving forward onto new platforms other than the institutional inertia and supply-chain entanglements that its prioritizing instead.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#36

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

anaganisk wrote: post #2

When a Power PC is perfectly capable for a MARS rover missions, I dont see any reason why they must run Snapdragons. Unless some evil company, starts ditching physical controls or starts shoving Ads into Speedometer. And everyone follows. Im thankful that automobile tech didn’t discover electron yet. Imagine your speedometer consuming 200mb of ram.

[deleted]

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#37

Post by dale_glass » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

Wouldn't the solution be planning better?

Sure, I understand that making a new car in combination with making a new ECU or brake controller on a new process is going to be stupidly dangerous and troublesome. So just don't.

Rather than doing it as a part of a single project, there should be a department or separate company making the ECU/controller. This way when the semiconductor company moves forwards, ECU Group starts a project targeting the new process, and releases the results when it's ready. And meanwhile what goes into the cars is the ECU built on the previous, well tested process.

Also, are modern cars really in much need of custom silicon? Micro-controllers are stupidly powerful now. There has to be off the shelf hardware capable of handling what a car needs. There are long standing architectures like ARM that don't require starting from scratch every time somebody makes a better chip.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#38

Post by shiftpgdn » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #29

schiffern wrote: post #7

> “We were able to substitute alternative chips, and then write the firmware in a matter of weeks,” Musk said. “It’s not just a matter of swapping out a chip; you also have to rewrite the software.” https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22595060/tesla-chip-short...

As far as I can tell, Tesla plays fast and loose, treating their product like a manufacturer of consumer electronics and not a manufacturer of a dangerous and durable good. That obviously allows them to out-compete other auto manufacturers who are more aware of things like product liability. See the Toyota accelerator-gate lawsuits. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic... : > However, on…

Toyota accelerator-gate is largely a farce. Almost all of the people involved with Toyota unintended acceleration were over the age of 65 and had the poorly designed loose floor mats in their cars.

Even if they had perfect readable John Carmack tier coding they still would have lost.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#39

Post by tyingq » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

mkr-hn wrote: post #32

dboreham wrote: post #11

Admittedly it was a long time ago, but I worked in the semi industry and this isn't how things were done. We manufactured batches of totally obsolete EOLed devices for various customers when they had sufficient volume. Devices that are in volume production (e.g. for cars) are carefully managed by people who do nothing but ensure that they're available in the right place at the right time in the right volume. In order…

The customers screwed up the forecast. That's a huge part of the problem. They assumed the pandemic would kill demand and cancelled orders, but it didn't, and the cancelled capacity was already sold to someone else.

As I understand it, there's also the case that you can't just move from one fab to another of the same process size at will. There's different setup/software/procedures, so the capacity isn't instantly interchangeable. There may even be fabs with excess capacity, but no "ready" customers.

Re: Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

#40

Post by zdragnar » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

mkr-hn wrote: post #32

dboreham wrote: post #11

Admittedly it was a long time ago, but I worked in the semi industry and this isn't how things were done. We manufactured batches of totally obsolete EOLed devices for various customers when they had sufficient volume. Devices that are in volume production (e.g. for cars) are carefully managed by people who do nothing but ensure that they're available in the right place at the right time in the right volume. In order…

The customers screwed up the forecast. That's a huge part of the problem. They assumed the pandemic would kill demand and cancelled orders, but it didn't, and the cancelled capacity was already sold to someone else.

I know of dealerships that had sales drop by 95% in the initial months of the pandemic. What they got wrong was the duration of the drop and that sales would bounce back, rather than simply return to normal after a bit.

Now some dealerships are selling new cars above MSRP, just because supply is so low.