Thread: Right to Repair
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Old 10-10-2021, 12:18 PM
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The_bluester (Paul)
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Seems one of the biggest users of legacy parts is the car industry. One of the bigger issues related to the "Chip shortage" is apparently the test and validation requirement for anything new in vehicles (E.G. chips used in safety critical systems, which in cars is a lot of them. Even just a stardard old opamp is suddenly safety critical if it happens to be hanging off the analog input of a drive by wire sensor) The upshot of that is the semiconductor industry want people to use their new designs which tend to produce higher yields (More chips on a wafer because they are smaller, or if they are the same size, a better proportion of chips on a given wafer which pass QC) but the car industry want to use the old, proven designs for as long as possible, and they don't want to be stampeded into using a design "off the plan" as the testing and validation can literally take years. They want it out there and proven first. So you have semiconductor makers not all that interested in ramping up production of stuff from ten years ago, and car makers not wanting to risk anything unproven.

With the semiconductor industry churning out 7nm process chips and moving to 5 and even 3nm, a lot of the car industry equipment is apparently still using 45 and 90nm process stuff, literally two decade old tech!
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