Can you really address the Automotive market with AP designed for smartphone?

By SemiWiki

March 16, 2016

If you remember, when TI decided to exit the booming wireless segment in 2012, the company decided to re-focus their application processor product line (OMAP) initially developed for smartphone “to a broader market including industrial clients like carmakers”. Being a TI employee in the 90’s in south of France, where TI has started the very successful wireless venture, I was feeling sad as it was the end of an amazing story. But I understood the business reasons and thought that it was a wise decision.

But the investment made by TI to develop OMAP had been huge, developing OMAP5 could be counted in thousands man.year, and the idea to target industrial market seems to be attractive. I was sharing this view, but I realize that I was naïve when thinking you can pick-up an existing SoC initially developed for wireless and decide to target automotive applications. These three words tell you why this was a naïve view: Reliability, Availability, Serviceability or RAS. The car pictured below is 58 years old. Do you really think that we will be able to use the first iPhone in 2065, even assuming that the proper network will be available?

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