The Impact of Higher System Voltage on Automotive Semiconductors

Doubling or quadrupling the present 12V electrical system provides advantages and disadvantages to many components, and to systems that utilize these components. The effect that this increase has on vehicle electronics starts at the semiconductor component level. Several design implications including technology tradeoffs must be evaluated, and the cost impact on silicon area, processing complexity, and current process limitations considered. This paper focuses on the impact of increasing the system voltage to 24V or 48V with and without centralized load dump transient suppression. The semiconductor devices principally affected are transient suppression devices, power semiconductors, smart power ICs and linear drivers. In addition, the effect of a change in system voltage on MCUs, DSPs, memory devices, and other interface circuits will be discussed.