Stefan Hartung

Chairman of the Board of Management- Robert Bosch

Semiconductors for a new mobility
Mobility technology, demand and regulations are accelerating rapidly as three fundamental transitions are happening concurrently: The workhorse of mobility is shifting from the combustion to the electric engine, the act of mobility is shifting from human control to autonomous driving, and the primary design principle of mobility is shifting from hardware to software. 

These transitions redefine the electric and electronic architectures of today’s mobility ecosystem. First, the new electric architecture revolves around electrified in-vehicle powertrains in close interaction with the off-vehicle power grid. Second, autonomous driving calls for sensor, actuator and infotainment systems with unprecedented data bandwidth, computing, and reliability requirements. Third, software-defined vehicles rely on frequent over-the-air updates to dynamically implement new business models and customer experiences. 

To that end, we repartition the electric and electronic architectures by creating hardware abstraction layers between the sensors and actuators at the edges, power and data processing units covering local zones, and vehicle computers as the electronic brains. The zones and edges contain most of the mobility-specific, safety- and homologation-relevant features, while the hardware-agnostic and update-intensive application logic is centralized in the brain. 

Semiconductors lie at the very core of this new mobility architecture, driving the performance of the powertrain with efficient power electronics, enabling physical perception with precise sensors, and providing tailored processing functions with flexible chiplet systems. This makes mobility electronics the fastest growing segment of the semiconductor market, calling for the combined innovation power of the mobility and semiconductor ecosystems.