Transportation Design Solutions

(Automotive Infotainment , Powertrain/Chassis, Body & Convenience)

Electronics based on semiconductor products and embedded software are a major criteria of differentiation in the transportation market. Manufacturers use semiconductor products in increasing numbers to develop powerful electronic systems for driver information and communication, power train/chassis and body control electronics, as well as automotive safety and convenience electronics. Almost 25% of the value of the average vehicle is composed of electrical and electronics components, half of which will be semiconductors.

Three primary areas expected to drive growth in complexity of transportation semiconductors:

  • Reducing emissions while improving on efficiency;
  • Personalization features, such as navigation and communication systems;
  • Convenience and comfort features.

Teams designing for transportation applications face many pressures while developing to tight schedules: Electronics product life cycles can be as short as two years, yet the product life of automobiles is often 10 years. In addition to long planning cycles, teams must design systems that provide significant reliability yet meet consumer electronics price points. Maximizing semiconductor opportunities in the transportation arena is a challenging task. The efforts of semiconductor companies to provide new features and meet aggressive development schedules, while protecting margins have dramatically changed the pattern of competition.

Features and Benefits

Numetrics enterprise resource planning software (NMX-ERP) helps design managers and project leaders tackle and conquer these product-development challenges for both embedded software and IC hardware—including the analog-mixed signal (AMS) functions that are vital to transportation systems.

NMX-ERP takes into consideration hundreds of design parameters along with unit information to quantify the IC product’s complexity. Using the NMX IC Industry Database™, project leaders can compare their IC project to similar projects within the transportation segment or benchmark the execution assumptions of their project plan with NMX IC Schedule Risk Analyzer™.

For example: The design manager of a high-end diesel glow plug control power-train IC or an advanced crash-avoidance safety IC can accurately describe control units with a wide array of logic, processor and memory functions. On the analog portion of the IC, the design manager can choose from more than 60 AMS functions, including DC/DC regulators (linear, switching), power devices (gate drivers), and analog-to-digital converters.

Project leaders then use NMX IC Project Planner™ to perform quick and reliable ‘what-if’ analysis of the project dimensions—complexity, duration, staffing—as they strive to meet the schedule and resource demands of the transportation-sector. Analysis of the entire development program (hardware and software) can be achieved with NMX Software Project Planner™ and Program Viewer. Similar ‘what-if’ analysis can be performed on embedded software projects while inter-project dependencies can be identified and evaluated using NMX Program Viewer. Each tool provides further insight into development schedule risk and improves predictability.

Whether it’s an analog-intensive IC design or a challenging real-time software implementation to manage multiple safety sensors on a subsystem, Numetrics NMX-ERP provides the latest information in transportation-IC and embedded software design to enable project leaders to:

  • Measure development productivity;
  • Improve the predictability of development schedules;
  • Quantify development schedule risk;
  • Benchmark against the industry’s best-in-class.

Resources

Contact us: info@numetrics.com