Driving Without a Map: Automotive OEMs Need Exploratory Traceability

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

As our daily activities become increasingly digitized, the global demand for microchips and electronic components will continue to skyrocket. As this need grows, there is also a greater need for assessment capabilities to avoid tragic malfunctions and debilitating product-wide recalls.

Consider the automotive industry where lives are at stake should a vehicle include a faulty chip. Automakers are bound to strict technical standards such as ISO 26262, which requires them to use state-of-the-art technology and to identify potential systemic and hardware defects during the manufacturing process. But the industry is not up to date; it’s not adopting state-of-the-art technology when it comes to chip quality and reliability.

As our cars become increasingly digital, industry leaders simply cannot afford to be complacent with insufficient traceability. With a rapid increase¹ in their reliance on automated processes and digitally advanced chips, automobiles today host complex electronic functions from sensors and cameras. As the technological focus of the industry changes, traceability must improve to meet the needs of an industry far different from the one it was even a decade ago.

To safeguard manufacturing, improve output efficiency and quality, and ultimately strengthen their bottom lines, OEMs must therefore elevate their standards beyond level 4 traceability² and strive for complete exploratory traceability. 

Traceability Today 

IATF 16949:2016³, the international standard for automotive quality management systems, attempts to ensure the quality of automotive manufacturing. But the production needs of modern vehicles have evolved far more rapidly than the regulations created to monitor them.

For decades, the automotive industry concentrated on optimizing product assembly over-assessing component quality. Currently, there are no widely used tools that provide 100% inspection of electronic components during manufacturing. 

While manufacturers do maintain tight supervision on quality control in the assembly process, assessing the authenticity and quality of individual components to prevent the integration of defective electronic components or those damaged by oxidized or corroded leads remains inadequate. Currently, the highest manufacturing standard still fails to examine products on the component level. In addition, the traceability resolution commonly in use is essentially just a glorified version of batch traceability. 

To read this entire article, which appeared in the July 2023 issue of SMT007 Magazine, click here.