All Things Auto…Let’s Begin
I’m excited to kick off a blog series on All Things Automotive. This topic is close to my heart. It is pretty much falling off a log to garner broad interest from a broad audience as we are now entering an era where the decades of fascination around cars that could drive themselves are now becoming a reality. I have been fortunate enough to have held many different roles throughout my career, both technical and business, that have been centered around the automotive market such that I have had a front-row seat to witness the transformation of this industry.
Cars are cool.
Why do I say that? Well, everyone who has ever owned a car has their own story about their car. It’s personal. For us boomers in the crowd, we knew exactly how to feather the accelerator when trying to start the car. It was somewhat of an art. If you didn’t understand what it took to get the car started, you would end up flooding the engine or running down the battery. Ultimately, over time you developed a personal relationship with your car and “understood” it.
Cars are personal.
When you ask someone about the first car they owned, you typically will hear a story that reflects some kind of unique relationship between them and their car. Many people have given their cars names, and everyone seems to have a mix of good and bad memories to share. If you’re ever looking for a good icebreaker– ask them about their first car. You probably won’t be disappointed.
My first car was a ’71 Ford LTD. Canary yellow with an olive-green interior. – What a color combo. This car was enormous. The trunk was big enough to allow me to pack all my possessions to go back and forth to college. With gasoline at 60 cents a gallon, fuel economy wasn’t even a thought. Complete with rotor and distributor cap, on a rainy day, if water got into the distributor cap the power steering, power brakes, power everything would fail. The first time this happened to me, it was quite a traumatic experience. In fact, every time it happened it was a traumatic experience. Today you probably need to go to a museum to see a distributor cap and most certainly, if you want to buy a fleer gauge to adjust the points. This has been long since replaced by electronic ignition and such.
For the first 150-plus years since the car was first invented, the adoption of electronics and technology in general in the car was slow. Seat belts were first introduced in 1885 and weren’t mandatory until somewhere around 1968. In California, it wasn’t until 1986 that you would receive a ticket if you weren’t wearing a seat belt. Growing up in the 60’s I used to enjoy watching Batman on TV. It was a light-hearted tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the comic book series. Not only was it one of the early shows to be filmed in color, something that was lost on me because we didn’t own a color TV, but every time Batman and Robin got into the Batmobile, they paused to show Batman and Robin both putting on their seatbelts. Kind of a public safety message at the time.
Fast forward to 2024, the advances in automobiles through the adoption of the most advanced semiconductor technologies, are, in my mind, even more profound than the introduction of the automobile itself. Self-driving cars, which have been the stuff of science fiction, today are a reality, albeit with some restrictions. These advances, which have only happened in the past 10 – 15 years, have led to significant improvements in safety over the seat belt, anti-lock brakes, or airbags, the mainstay for several decades.
Historically, the electronics in the vehicle were based upon mature, low-technology semiconductors at the level of 8-bit microcontrollers fabricated on semiconductor nodes that were at least a decade old. For many of the major automotive OEMs, electronics was considered context, not core to their business. This led to the introduction of Tier 1’s including Visteon and Delphi which were the spin-out of the electronics groups within Ford and GM respectively. Ford’s spin-out of their electronics group, named Visteon happened in 2000.
Today, auto OEMs have come to realize that the use of technology to enable a safer and more enjoyable driving experience is driving consumer purchasing decisions, not brand loyalty. This is a dramatic change from the past when brand, styling, engine, and transmission were the traditional factors that drove consumer purchase decisions. The technologies adopted in today’s vehicles are not for the faint of heart; they represent some of the most leading-edge technologies across multiple disciplines including, semiconductor technologies, packaging, artificial intelligence, and computing architectures, with many still on the drawing table as they are still being defined by some of the best minds across many different industries.
Automotive OEMs grappling with the fact that electronics has quickly moved from being context to core are now starting to “spin in” electronics organizations – a term, I have been told is referred to as “the double helix”. In 2017 – just 17 years after Ford spun out Visteon, they hired 400 engineers from Blackberry to accelerate the development of vehicle electronics. This is just one very small example of the expansive disruption that has been and continues to occur across the entire automotive value chain. The disruptions are profound and make for rich stories for a blog series. I will most definitely talk about these in future blogs.
As an introductory blog, I thought that this would serve as a good backdrop to understand the motivations for the adoption and development of leading technologies across multiple disciplines. Future blogs will be more technical, covering topics including chiplets, cybersecurity, functional safety, artificial intelligence, sensors, the evolution of automotive architectures, and the very popular software-defined vehicle, amongst many others.
I’m excited to kick off a blog series on All Things Automotive. This topic is close to my heart. It is pretty much falling off a log to garner broad interest from a broad audience as we are now entering an era where the decades of fascination around cars that could drive themselves are now becoming a reality. I have been fortunate enough to have held many different roles throughout my career, both technical and business, that have been centered around the automotive market such that I have had a front-row seat to witness the transformation of this industry.
Cars are cool.
Why do I say that? Well, everyone who has ever owned a car has their own story about their car. It’s personal. For us boomers in the crowd, we knew exactly how to feather the accelerator when trying to start the car. It was somewhat of an art. If you didn’t understand what it took to get the car started, you would end up flooding the engine or running down the battery. Ultimately, over time you developed a personal relationship with your car and “understood” it.
Cars are personal.
When you ask someone about the first car they owned, you typically will hear a story that reflects some kind of unique relationship between them and their car. Many people have given their cars names, and everyone seems to have a mix of good and bad memories to share. If you’re ever looking for a good icebreaker– ask them about their first car. You probably won’t be disappointed.
My first car was a ’71 Ford LTD. Canary yellow with an olive-green interior. – What a color combo. This car was enormous. The trunk was big enough to allow me to pack all my possessions to go back and forth to college. With gasoline at 60 cents a gallon, fuel economy wasn’t even a thought. Complete with rotor and distributor cap, on a rainy day, if water got into the distributor cap the power steering, power brakes, power everything would fail. The first time this happened to me, it was quite a traumatic experience. In fact, every time it happened it was a traumatic experience. Today you probably need to go to a museum to see a distributor cap and most certainly, if you want to buy a fleer gauge to adjust the points. This has been long since replaced by electronic ignition and such.
For the first 150-plus years since the car was first invented, the adoption of electronics and technology in general in the car was slow. Seat belts were first introduced in 1885 and weren’t mandatory until somewhere around 1968. In California, it wasn’t until 1986 that you would receive a ticket if you weren’t wearing a seat belt. Growing up in the 60’s I used to enjoy watching Batman on TV. It was a light-hearted tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the comic book series. Not only was it one of the early shows to be filmed in color, something that was lost on me because we didn’t own a color TV, but every time Batman and Robin got into the Batmobile, they paused to show Batman and Robin both putting on their seatbelts. Kind of a public safety message at the time.
Fast forward to 2024, the advances in automobiles through the adoption of the most advanced semiconductor technologies, are, in my mind, even more profound than the introduction of the automobile itself. Self-driving cars, which have been the stuff of science fiction, today are a reality, albeit with some restrictions. These advances, which have only happened in the past 10 – 15 years, have led to significant improvements in safety over the seat belt, anti-lock brakes, or airbags, the mainstay for several decades.
Historically, the electronics in the vehicle were based upon mature, low-technology semiconductors at the level of 8-bit microcontrollers fabricated on semiconductor nodes that were at least a decade old. For many of the major automotive OEMs, electronics was considered context, not core to their business. This led to the introduction of Tier 1’s including Visteon and Delphi which were the spin-out of the electronics groups within Ford and GM respectively. Ford’s spin-out of their electronics group, named Visteon happened in 2000.
Today, auto OEMs have come to realize that the use of technology to enable a safer and more enjoyable driving experience is driving consumer purchasing decisions, not brand loyalty. This is a dramatic change from the past when brand, styling, engine, and transmission were the traditional factors that drove consumer purchase decisions. The technologies adopted in today’s vehicles are not for the faint of heart; they represent some of the most leading-edge technologies across multiple disciplines including, semiconductor technologies, packaging, artificial intelligence, and computing architectures, with many still on the drawing table as they are still being defined by some of the best minds across many different industries.
Automotive OEMs grappling with the fact that electronics has quickly moved from being context to core are now starting to “spin in” electronics organizations – a term, I have been told is referred to as “the double helix”. In 2017 – just 17 years after Ford spun out Visteon, they hired 400 engineers from Blackberry to accelerate the development of vehicle electronics. This is just one very small example of the expansive disruption that has been and continues to occur across the entire automotive value chain. The disruptions are profound and make for rich stories for a blog series. I will most definitely talk about these in future blogs.
As an introductory blog, I thought that this would serve as a good backdrop to understand the motivations for the adoption and development of leading technologies across multiple disciplines. Future blogs will be more technical, covering topics including chiplets, cybersecurity, functional safety, artificial intelligence, sensors, the evolution of automotive architectures, and the very popular software-defined vehicle, amongst many others.
