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Like we have described briefly before, in-vehicle networks play a crucial role of connecting and facilitating communication between the expanding arrays of individual electronic components inside a car.
The increasing number and complexity of electronic components coupled with the demand for a robust precise multiplexing solution is creating technological barriers that the automobile OEM and Tier-1s must surmount for production of an automobile.
The electrical and electronic architecture itself and this by far does not mean the individual enabling technologies, starts to become a not well known, young but cost, time to market, product success as life critical design decision and manageability challenge of respected and well estimated importance but not well known and elaborated challenge.
How critical the management of complexity is to the success of a vehicle over a lifetime of 30 years starting from production can be seen in figure 3.
The picture is taken from a current presentation of Mentor Graphics held at the Automotive Technology Days 2007 in Tokyo and demonstrated in one look the current situation.
 Figure 3: Complexity challenge of in vehicle electronic components.
While the electronic amount inside of cars is estimated to reach in 2010 estimated 40% of the vehicle costs, at the same time the allowed time to start of production will shrink for a vehicle from 48 months in 1985 to estimated 12 months in 2015.
Even after the production warranty expenses have significant impact on the success of a car platform inside an OEM, determining it the sustainability of the received sales profit.
But warranty and issues about the stability and functionality of the synergetic effect of all electronic components used by the architecture is with iterative methods not anymore guarantee able. Software simulation and system test reaches a bound where it becomes untestable and indeterministic.
The first stages in vehicle design, where groundbreaking decisions are done in an early stage impacting the future process stages becomes more crucial and costly than most of us would expect.
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