Designing autonomous driving systems is equally important for the quality of hardware products and the process reliability of software algorithms. DAISCH has now officially certified that its Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) products meet all the requirements of IATF 16949:2016, the international standard for quality management in the automotive industry. This top-notch certification shows that DAISCH is not only superior in software development processes, but also passes the highest requirements in the automotive industry for hardware design, production and supply chain management, and has built a quality base for its authoritative role in autonomous driving.
IATF 16949:2016: The Automotive Global Quality Management Passport
IATF 16949:2016 is an internationally used quality management standard that has been constructed by the International Automotive Task Force (IATF). Based on ISO 9001 the standard is greatly improved to consider the special aspects of the automotive industry. The certification is not a product certification, but it is a comprehensive evaluation and certification of an organization’s quality management system, continuous improvement capability and supply chain management.
Its core principles are:
- Defect Prevention: Focusing on robust processes to ensure that they do not occur in the first place, as opposed to just final inspection.
- Risk Reduction in Supply Chain: Requiring that traceable and stable supply chains are set up.
- Continuous Improvement: Optimizing organization’s process and products continually to improve organization’s efficiency and customer’s satisfaction.
In effect, IATF 16949 has become a basic requirement for any company wanting to enter the mainstream automotive supply chain on a global basis, wherein this certification is the most basic evidence of robust and trustworthy manufacturing capability.
The Core Value of Certification to Authoritative DAISCH IMU
For core sensors such as the DAISCH IMU which are used in safety-critical systems, acquiring IATF 16949 certification provides a number of key advantages:
- Assurance of Superior Product Consistency: The certification assures that DAISCH utilizes very standardized and automated processes for the mass production of its IMUs. This ensures the same performance, accuracy, and reliability at every single unit that is manufactured, essentially eliminating batch quality risks and satisfying OEMs’ almost insane requirement for “zero defects.”
- Reliability and Durability over the Lifecycle: The IATF 16949 standard puts high focus on product quality and reliability over its life-cycle. Through this certification, DAISCH proves that it has implemented a complete reliability engineering and testing system, which enables its IMU products to withstand the severe automotive conditions (temperature, vibration, long-term wear, etc.), thus guaranteeing stable operation of AS for their entire service period.
- Robust Supply Chain Management: The standard places very rigid requirements on supplier management. The certification of DAISCH means that the whole chain of the production process is controlled and traceable, from procurement of raw materials to the supply of components and the entire manufacturing process. This makes it possible to actively respond to the dynamic changes in the supply chain and meet customer demand in a stable and timely manner.
Conclusion:
The successful achievement of the IATF 16949:2016 certification for the IMU products of DAISCH is the ideal complementation and strengthening of its longstanding Automotive SPICE certification. Together, these two credentials provide an irrefutable fact: DAISCH has not only the process capability to develop world-class embedded software, it also has the quality systems to design and manufacture world-class automotive hardware products.
This deep “hardware-software expertise” further establishes DAISCH as a highly trusted and credible strategic partner in the eyes of the autonomous driving developers and OEMs around the world.