Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1441485
18 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2022 there's going to be 1,000 volts inside. It is basically a distribution center. You make that accessible enough and replaceable enough that it becomes much like changing your tim- ing belt every three years. But eventually, that's going to change because you have a supercomputer in your car doing all the vision, radar, and Lidar. You can't keep up with it unless your battery is output- ting quite a bit of voltage and power. Eventu- ally it's going to catch up, but right now, from an electrical and cabling perspective, is this distributed design, so you don't have to run a massive cable all the way around. You will use it sporadically where you need it, keep it in a central location, and then get smaller cable- based systems. Holden: With the number of people jumping into the electric vehicle arena, do you worry about whether we'll have enough electrical engineers to go around? Will the more entre- preneurial ones with a really great PCB design for EVs just license out the design, so EV com- panies won't need designers? Buja: It's an excellent point. If we look at the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) report, with all the vendors sell- ing hop-up parts just for mechanical engines, what's going to happen with all these boards in the future when they're all being manufac- tured as SEMA upgrade parts for your Tesla? at market will have to evolve on its own but consider the world of planned obsolescence. People want to get 15 years out of a car, but it's driven by an iPhone with a planned obso- lescence window of maybe 60 days? At what point do these things have to mesh? Companioni: e question of reliability gets really interesting if the promise of transpor- tation-as-a-service ends up taking off because there's this grand vision that we will have no more actual human drivers, no more actual direct car ownership; you just have a whole fleet of cars circling the roads all day every day, and if you need one, you call it up. We're seeing these cars have highly increased duty cycles compared to what they have now. Right now, everybody's car is parked, not doing anything. en it drives for 20–30 min- utes, and sits for another eight, nine, 10 hours. If this transportation-as-a-service takes off, the cars will be spinning all day every day, and that brings up a different question of reliabil- ity, especially with these supercomputers like Sanu was saying that are drawing many hun- dreds of kilowatts and putting these compo- nents through an extreme condition for long periods of time. Buja: But it's a scary thought that you have all these cars on the roads constantly until we have an EM pulse or something from a solar storm that just shuts all the traffic down. Johnson: I was just realizing that what might have been over-engineering for automotive components in the past won't be based on that change and usage model. Companioni: From the PCB design soware standpoint, we will need to agree on differ- Wilmer Companioni