Everyone’s talking about electrification, smarter driver assistance, and cars that run on software. The industry buzz? Compliance, checklists, new features, clever algorithms. But honestly, some of the most expensive and dangerous failures in car electronics don’t come from missed requirements or a bug in the code. They arise when electrical, electromagnetic, thermal, and architectural behaviors interact under stress in ways that were never fully modeled or anticipated.
Few engineers have spent as much time at this intersection as Abdul Salam Abdul Karim, an automotive hardware and systems engineering leader with nearly two decades of experience designing safety-critical electronics across ADAS, electrification, intelligent lighting, and high-reliability control systems. Abdul Salam’s been deep in the trenches, working on OEM and Tier-1 platforms all over the world. He’s tackled everything from high-level ADAS (think L2+ to full autonomy), battery management, domain controllers, even lighting ECUs that have to survive the harshest environments.
In this conversation, Abdul brings his hardware-first mindset to the table. Years of owning the whole process, from architecture calls and signal integrity deep dives to safety validation and making sure things hold up in the real world, have convinced him that you can’t build truly robust vehicle electronics if everyone’s off working in their own bubble.
Q: People usually treat automotive safety and reliability like a checklist. From your perspective, where does that framing fall short?
Abdul Salam Abdul Karim:
Checklists are useful, but they don’t explain how real systems behave once they leave the lab. In production vehicles, failures rarely remain isolated within one discipline. But here’s the thing: a borderline power rail can throw off your timing margins. Electromagnetic noise can distort signals that appear compliant on paper. Thermal stress can slowly degrade components long before a fault is visible.
In my experience, robust systems don’t fail because a single requirement was missed. They fail when interactions between power behavior, signal integrity, timing, thermal limits, and system architecture were not fully understood under worst-case conditions. Those interactions are difficult to capture if safety is treated purely as a procedural exercise rather than a physical design problem.
Q: You often describe robustness as something that must emerge from design rather than be added later. What does that mean in practice?
Abdul Salam:
It means designing hardware behavior, electromagnetic effects, and functional intent as a single, integrated system. Power integrity, grounding strategy, signal integrity, diagnostics, and fault containment are not independent decisions; they shape each other.
When these elements are designed together early, systems behave predictably even under extreme stress. When they’re handled separately, small deviations accumulate until margins quietly disappear. In practice, the most meaningful reliability gains usually come from early architectural decisions, when you still have the flexibility to shape the system, rather than late fixes intended to compensate for fundamental limitations.
Q: How does this integrated approach apply across vehicle domains such as electrification, sensing, and lighting electronics?
Abdul Salam:
The underlying physics don’t change across domains. Electrification systems depend on stable power behavior and fault containment. Perception systems depend on signal integrity, synchronization, and timing margins. Lighting electronics introduce high currents, fast switching, thermal stress, and long-term aging effects that can influence nearby sensing and control electronics.
Inside a vehicle, these systems never operate in isolation. As architectures move toward zonal and centralized designs, coupling effects become more pronounced. Treating each domain as a separate problem increases the risk of hidden interactions that only surface after deployment, when fixes are at their most expensive.
Q: Many teams rely heavily on certifications and tool-driven validation. How do you view that balance?
Abdul Salam:
Certifications and tools are important, but they don’t replace engineering responsibility. Ultimately, organizations depend on designs that remain predictable across temperature, noise, aging, and real-world operating conditions and not just during formal testing.
Robustness cannot be proven solely after the design is complete. It emerges when failure modes, margins, and interactions are considered from the beginning. Tools help validate assumptions, but they cannot compensate for architectures that were never designed to behave well under stress.
Q: OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers are facing increasing recalls, warranty returns, and OTA fixes. How can these issues be reduced earlier in development?
Abdul Salam:
Many field issues originate very early, when electrical behavior, thermal stress, and real-world operating conditions are treated independently. Noise, marginal power behavior, and environmental stress often combine in ways that are invisible if each discipline works in isolation.
Reducing recalls starts with early co-design and continuous alignment between functional safety, signal and power integrity, electromagnetic behavior, and thermal limits. Using simulation to explore worst-case scenarios, updating DFMEA and FMEDA as designs evolve, and verifying closure of high-risk failure modes through DV, PV, and extended validation makes a measurable difference.
OTA updates can address symptoms. They cannot compensate for fundamental hardware constraints.
Q: Where do teams most often underestimate risk in modern vehicle electronics?
Abdul Salam:
Timing and interaction effects are frequently underestimated. An interface might seem rock-solid when you test it alone, but throw in some noise, hit it with real-world load swings, or just let it age, and suddenly you’re losing margin. The system still looks like it’s working, but underneath, it’s quietly drifting away from what’s actually safe.
Now that cars are moving to shared resources and centralized setups, these hidden interactions really start to matter. Ignore them, and you’re asking for trouble. Small deviations can propagate across domains if they aren’t anticipated early.
Q: Looking ahead, what kind of engineering mindset will matter most as vehicle electronics continue to evolve?
Abdul Salam:
As vehicles become more complex, reliability will depend less on individual features and more on how the entire electronic system behaves as a whole. Engineers who understand electrical behavior, electromagnetic effects, thermal limits, and system-level interaction will be critical to building platforms that scale safely.
Robust systems aren’t created by adding safeguards one by one. They’re created when the entire architecture is designed to behave predictably even when conditions are far from ideal.
Rather than treating safety, electrification, sensing, electromagnetic behavior, and reliability as parallel concerns, an integrated hardware-centric approach recognizes them as inseparable aspects of a single physical system. As vehicle electronics grow more complex and more autonomous, this philosophy is becoming essential, not optional.
In modern vehicles, robustness, as well as the safety that follows from it, is ultimately determined by engineering decisions made long before software ever runs.
