Mission profile-based assessment of semiconductor technologies for automotive applications

Semiconductor technology has to be qualified under the harsh temperature conditions required by the AEC-Q100 qualification standard before it is applied in the automotive sector. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess different semiconductor technologies for typical automotive electronics components considering both AEC-Q100 temperature specifications and real world automotive environmental temperature profiles as given by mission profiles. The results of the use-case on SRAM indicate that the conventional qualification process based on AEC-Q100 significantly underestimates the reliability of advanced semiconductor technologies and prevents their application in automotive electronics. Qualification based on AEC-Q100 also slightly underestimates the power and performance, however, the amount of underestimation reduces by technology scaling. In addition, our analysis shows that technology scaling does not lead to a performance boost in typical automotive applications due to severe reliability challenges of advanced technology nodes in automotive environments. As a consequence, we consider mission profile-based technology assessment as a promising alternative to the qualification of semiconductor technologies in automotive applications.