LSI Technology for Meeting the Quality Goals for Automotive Electronics

The continuously increasing integration level and resultant “system-on-silicon” and customization trends in VLSI technology will have a significant impact on future automotive electronics. The microcomputer, which is the kernel semiconductor device in automotive electronics, reflects the tremds decribed above. As the VLSI integration level increases, reliability or quality issues will become more and more important, because of the increased impact of a possible device failure. This is particularly so in VLSIs for automotive electronics. In this paper, VLSI technology trends and ways for meeting reliability or quality goals will be reviewed. Also it outlines a future look at automotive electronics in the 21st century, based on a system-on-silicon microcomputer chip, in which several processor units with different functions are integrated together by ULSI technology, where more than ten million device elements are integrated within a single silicon chip with low submicron feature size.