Progress in semiconductor technology and its impact on the development process

The complexity of semiconductor components designed into automotive applications will continue to increase. The progress of technology will accelerate and by the year 2003 we expect more than 100 mia. transistors to be realized within one integrated circuit. The integration of mixed digital and analog technologies on a single chip will increasingly be possible and will enable Mechatronic the seamless amalgamate of electronics and mechanics. Such technologies will give the automotive system designer much more freedom of system partitioning but will also cause a whole new degree of complexity which the development process has to live up with. The authors discuss the major implications and present several examples of how a next generation development flow could look like.