In automotive electronics, various stressors appear in a combined manner, which neither are covered by standards nor can be settled at reasonable effort in a laboratory environment. Immediately after a car leaves the factory, a mix of variable and combined stress factors are applied to the car and its electronics.

This results in sometimes surprising failure mechanisms and scenarios, which in principle, could be avoided by simple preventive methods. The tutorial shows this by means of numerous illustrative examples in the following fields:

• Failures by cross talking, wireless transceivers and electromagnetic spikes
• ESD-in-operation – failures
• Failures caused by automotive-specific ambient stress
• Failures due to vibration, mechanical shock and mechanical tensile stress
• LED failures in cars
• EOS scenarios in automobiles, how to distinguish them from other failures
• System circuitry issues

Many of these problems can be avoided by cheap and simple countermeasures.

It is hardly known that in automotive application, only about 10% of semiconductor device failures are caused by their manufacturing processes, while about 90% are caused by later assembly and sequential processes, by the circuit and application environment, by missing derating or by (intentiously) use beyond their specified maximum ratings.

Component’s specification versus system specifications are frequently subject to severe misunderstandings and disputes between the members of the manufacturing/ supply chain. The tutorial will highlight illustrative examples in different components and systems and – by means of these examples – introduce into methods of system-level failure anamnesis, which is a complementary sister of (component level) failure analysis.