Toshiba Samples eUFS Devices for Vehicles: Extended Temps & Reliability Features

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• Beaver M. - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link

  The biggest problem is in fact mechanical stress. Just in a different way you imagine. In cars huge temperature differences exist.
  
  In Summer its hot as hell there and the electronics get even hotter because of their own operation. But if you shut the car down in a garage, the temperature will still drop quite a bit.
  
  In Winter its very cold but gets pretty warm inside the car when the heater is turned on and the electronics heat themselves up. But if you turn the car off, it will cool down massively and quickly, since few cars are well insulated.
  
  What I am trying to explain, is that huge temperature change is the culprit. It makes solder connections brittle over time, because they expand and contract with temperature changes. Say you use a normal consumer mainboard in a car (and some have done this - CarPCs), it will show defects after just a few years, if its not a car that you only drive in Summer. Even if its a Summer-car, its still likely it will show problems soon, because youre most likely storing it over the winter, which wont be at Summer temperatures.
  And even in mild climates you will see issues, because the vibrations in a car will affect solder connections as well and the solder connections on a consumer board wont be designed to withstand a lot of vibration.
  
  And thats why turning electronics on and off is such a huge strain on them. Especially with the relatively new RoHS, which forces manufacturers to use lower quality solder or solder with different properties.
  
  If you open electronics in older cars (80s and 90s), you will see they have huge solder connections. Thats not because back then they werent able to do finer things, but thats actually to counter what I just explained. Today electronics control everything in a car. Often they use small computer units for everything and everywhere, which are also all interconnected. Those arent soldered like in the 80s or 90s anymore. They are small and its all very tight together. If something loses contact, it can affect things that even engineers cant predict.
  Thats why there are such huge electronic issues with cars nowadays, problems even mechanic shops dont understand and are never able to fix.

• FullmetalTitan - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link

  Extreme temperature cycling puts enormous stress on physical components of the package like the interconnects since they are made of different materials and experience processes such as thermal expansion/contraction differently.
  These devices can CERTAINLY survive above and below those temp values, but the qualification is to meet that operating range with very high reliability over the lifetime of a vehicle.
  For consumer electronics, these "burn in" tests are typically to simulate 10 years of normal use as the quality threshold. For automotive there are greater reliability concerns since a failed auto part can lead to a crash, where a failed memory controller on a phone is a bricked device that doesn't kill anyone. Depending on the automotive spec, the testing requirements expand from 10 years to 15 or 20, and the temperature range you must certify safe lifelong operation within expand significantly (there are wider ranges in more strict specs).

• vortmax2 - Monday, December 18, 2017 - link

  The question is: Will this take some of the lag out of typical car infotainment systems?? I sure hope so.

• Beaver M. - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link

  What lag? You mean the delay after pushing a button?
  Thats by design. Why? I dont know. But Ive seen code of different infotainment systems. They all have artificial delays put in there.