April 6, 2007 -- As cars move closer to becoming highly integrated transportation, information and entertainment systems, their semiconductor content continues to grow. Today's cars comprise several dozen processors, a wide range of sensors and various types of control, safety, comfort and communications systems. All of these systems have one thing in common " the need for non-volatile storage.

Automotive system memory comes in many different forms, ranging from just a few hundred bits to store IDs and sensor calibration data up to several megabytes to hold complex programs in firmware. Different systems have different requirements for the non-volatile memory (NVM) they use, but all are looking for memory that is inexpensive, reliable, secure and easily implemented in their respective systems. Let's delve into some of the more apparent applications to determine their memory requirements and the attributes they need to have.

By Charles Ng. (Ng is President of Kilopass Technology, Inc.)