“Some manufacturers will specify performance and some will even [detail] vibration characteristics, but only in rare cases will they specify the electronic components that will be used to implement those specifications. They do the 'paper job,' and rely on suppliers for nitty-gritty details.”
“The power technology in lamps and windshield wipers today are really quite sophisticated. It is under the control of the microcontroller, which tells it how much power to allow. Rather than just turn on, it says 'I know this load on this lamp to be 4A,' and if the load exceeds that value, the lamp will turn off immediately. A traditional relay control would just turn it on, despite the short, and would burn up. Then you would have to buy all kinds of expensive pieces instead of replacing a bulb or a small wire.”
“The automotive environment is indeed a unique environment. What is commonplace in automotive, no consumer product can survive, so all our semiconductors must work over a broad range of temperature—typically from –40 to +125°C—and typically the devices are lower power and have stringent ESD/EMI requirements. If they get a failure in a car, it is nearly a catastrophe. Everything has to work in automotive. That puts a lot of constraints on an electrical system. They are not sloppy constraints either, because as you connect all the electronic components together, you get a lot of tolerance-stack issues that don't allow you to be very sloppy.”
“There's no question in my mind that USB is going to happen. There's a lot of activity for inclusion by model year 2009, with some offerings coming sooner.”
