Hardware and Sensing Technologies

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[karlisberkolds]

The underlying active physical components for all electronic systems are semiconductors. Semiconductors span several major categories based on function, material system, and integration level. At the most basic level are discrete devices such as diodes, MOSFETs, IGBTs, and rectifiers, which control current and voltage and are widely used in power conversion and motor drives. Analog and mixed-signal semiconductors handle sensing, amplification, signal conditioning, and power management (e.g., ADCs, DACs, voltage regulators, sensor interfaces). Memory semiconductors—such as DRAM, SRAM, NAND flash, and emerging non-volatile memories like MRAM—store data and program code. Power semiconductors use materials such as silicon, silicon carbide (SiC), and gallium nitride (GaN) to efficiently switch high voltages and currents in electric vehicles, aircraft power systems, and renewable energy converters. Finally, specialized devices such as RF front-end chips, image sensors (CMOS), FPGAs, and AI accelerators support communication, perception, and high-performance computing tasks. Together, these categories form the layered semiconductor ecosystem that underpins modern automotive, airborne, marine, and space electronic architectures. An important category is digital logic devices include microcontrollers (MCUs), microprocessors (MPUs), and system-on-chip (SoC) devices that execute programming of some form (FPGA, Software, AI). We shall discuss this in greater detail in the next chapter on software.

In this chapter, we shall review historical background to the absorption of semiconductors in various mobility domains. As a part of this background, we shall outline some key “productization” challenges such as safety, governance, and supply chain management. With this background, we will introduce the jump in complexity introduced by autonomy and revisit the key “productization” challenges.