onsemi today announced that the company has shipped its one billionth Inductive Sensor Interface Integrated Circuit (IC) to HELLA, an international automotive supplier operating under the umbrella brand FORVIA. The IC designed by onsemi is being used in HELLA’s Contactless Inductive Position Sensor (CIPOS) technology for automotive x-by-wire systems. Throughout their 25-year collaboration, the companies developed innovative design methods that reduced the size of both the HELLA module and the onsemi IC to better fit the demanding applications of the module’s form factor.
CIPOS® is an inductive technology used in passenger and commercial vehicles for drive-by-wire systems such as accelerator pedal sensing, steering and torque sensors, as well as actuators for pressure boost and turbos. The IC designed by onsemi is the central element of the HELLA solution and, together with the connected coil structure, forms the inductive position sensor. As the solution is contactless, the accuracy provided by the onsemi IC is guaranteed over the lifetime of the CIPOS® system. The CIPOS® technology is also completely immune to stray magnetic fields, a key asset for an automotive industry driven towards electrification. This industry-leading technology is widely used by many of the major automotive OEMs, with HELLA being a global market leader in the field of accelerator pedal sensors.
“We have benefitted from onsemi’s technologies and development expertise for many years, which has allowed us to make CIPOS® a market-leading sensing solution,” said Marco Döbrich, head of the Sensors business field at HELLA. “The ICs’ quality levels are outstanding, and our far-sighted capacity planning with onsemi enables us to plan ahead but stay agile in a tough market.”
A more than two decades long collaboration led to the successful release of the very first automotive inductive position sensor in 1999. Since then, onsemi has provided HELLA with three generations of inducting positioning interfaces. Each generation has been specifically developed for, and together with, HELLA.
“Without our teams understanding each other’s technologies and processes at such precise levels, we could not have reached this significant milestone with HELLA,” said Sudhir Gopalswamy, senior vice president and general manager, Advanced Solutions Group, onsemi. “But we won’t stop here and are already working on a fourth generation of inductive positioning sensor technologies. This generation will include system level improvements especially in the areas of Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASIL-x) as the industry moves ever closer to fully autonomous driving.”
