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Auto Market Assault
Actel Announces Progress
With today’s automobiles acting as mass-produced rolling showcases of electronic technology, winning sockets in automotive electronics applications has become a major goal of just about every semiconductor company. The draw is enormous. In many countries, consumers pour a huge chunk of their monthly budgets into automobiles, and the percentage of that money that flows into electronics is also rapidly increasing. We have reached a sweet spot in electronic technology capabilities where the number of new, useful features that can be added to automobiles with advanced electronics is exploding.
FPGA and programmable logic vendors are attracted to automobile applications (and automotive engineers are attracted to FPGAs) for a variety of good reasons. Programmability offers the potential for easy and inexpensive field upgrades and fixes, the ability to create multiple product variants with a single piece of hardware, and the flexibility to qualify and inventory a single piece of silicon for a large number of applications in the auto’s bill of materials (BOM).
This week, Actel announced a new qualification of its ProASIC3 family for automotive applications – AEC-Q100 Grade 2 and Grade 1. Even though the automotive industry represents a potentially lucrative semiconductor market, it also has one of the most difficult and complex sets of qualification standards in the industry – rivaling and sometimes even surpassing standards for military and aerospace applications. The significance of Actel’s announcement is that their ProASIC3 devices can now be used in a wide variety of automotive applications, including many “under the hood” sockets that previously were unavailable to FPGAs.
The “Grade” designations are for automotive ambient temperature ranges Grade 0 = +150C, Grade 1 = +125C, Grade 2 = +105C, Grade 3 = +85C, and Grade 4 = +70C. The temperature figures can be confusing because suppliers may quote (or qualify) either ambient or junction temperatures for automotive products. Generally, junction temperatures run 10C -25C higher than ambient. The low power consumption (particularly the static power performance) of the Actel devices help to combat reliability problems related to high junctions temperatures which can, in the extreme case, lead to thermal runaway. [more]
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