Challenges for automotive high-performance compute and sensing

No surprise saying that the automotive industry is going through challenging, potentially disruptive, times. Both from ‘business’ point of view as from the perspective of ‘performance and innovation’ opportunities. While using not too long ago still manual gears, taking a decade for the adoption of automated transmission cars, now entering the era of advanced driver assistance, connected and autonomous driving at an astounding speed.

These revolutionary developments for the future software-defined vehicles do require an enormous increase of the car’s computational demand that is hard to meet in a monolithic way at an affordable cost and in a timely way.  Chiplet based solutions have been introduced and adopted primarily in the field of high-performance compute but equally hold great potential for the automotive industry. A flexible mix of smaller dedicated chips combined w/ proven, legacy node devices will facilitate customization, reduce the development time and allow efficient re-use of building blocks.

As the automotive industry has its own set of unique environmental challenges, stringent safety requirements and a cost-efficient drive, the introduction of these advanced packaging technologies need further validation. This includes proper technology selection, ensuring a consistent supply chain and unfailing reliability performance. This latter need opens the path for prognostic health monitoring and design-for-repair. This talk will highlight imec’s activities to make automotive chiplets and advanced sensors a reality.