Themes and variations

摘要

Electronic control units within vehicles are enjoying big market growth. But lack of standardisation means that each new unit is created virtually from scratch. Jorg Christoffel talks to Siemens VDO about its ideas for tackling this problem. According to a recent study of the German Association of the Electronics Industry, ZVEI, vehicle electronics will grow three-and-a-half times faster than the number of cars manufactured in the period from 199.5 to 2009. Semiconductors are taking off even more clearly: chip growth outperforms vehicle manufacturing growth by a factor of 7.4, the ZVEI statistics predict. While the car remains a fairly small application field for semiconductors on a worldwide level, the increasing importance the car industry has to the chip industry is because of electronic control units (ECUs). "A luxury model can have up to 80 electronic controllers distributed all over the vehicle," says Dr. Ulrich Schrey, vice president body controller and gateway products at Siemens VDO Automotive.