Manufacturing Support Design for Low-Cost Instrument Clusters

All automotive ECUs are required to be designed for manufacturability. Sufficient support in the ECU product design needs to be incorporated early in the product life cycle for the product to be successfully and efficiently manufactured, necessitating serial communication capability in the design. However, in low-cost automotive Instrument Clusters the customer requirements for the product typically do not encapsulate serial communication, and the ECU is not required to support repair/rework out of field rejection. This paper delineates the said need, examines the challenges for manufacturability of low-cost Instrument Clusters and proposes a plausible design strategy to help the issue with a use-case instance.