Qualification extension of automotive smart power and digital ICs to harsh aerospace mission profiles: Gaps and opportunities

Historically the aerospace market has always chosen high level reliability solutions through customized technologies and processes, in order to cope with the requirement driven by mission profiles and application environment severity. In parallel, Automotive market required more and more high reliability targets. As a consequence, the qualification activity has evolved, passing from a stress driven approach strictly based on AEC-Q100 standard to a failure mode driven approach oriented to satisfy the robustness criteria required by TIER1 and Car Makers. Starting from this scenario, new market opportunities for Automotive devices can be identified, since the most reliable of them are today eligible to be sold to aerospace manufacturers with important cost saving thanks to massive production volumes of consolidated technologies. A gap may still persist and has to be carefully explored. First of all, a study of the different application constraints has to be carried out and the potential failure modes activated by Aerospace cold unbalanced mission profile, atmospheric pressure and radiations have to be analysed. Experimental evidences have been collected as first step on advanced CMOS technologies, and their extension to the smart-power families, where digital and power coexist together, will be shortly discussed in this paper.