The shift towards zonal is really going to drive and allow the software defined vehicle. Without it, it couldn't become a reality. You're going to see OEMs in the future have basically a predominantly software development exercise. Historically, the OEMs and the tier ones have designed optimized hardware centric based systems. Then they would decide what software is required to enable the systems. With the zonal architecture, the exact opposite is going to occur. The OEMs are first going to design and evolve the software to control the zones, and then they'll consider how the hardware needs to change and adapt to support the software. The hardware now is going to follow the software, and this is going to enable a transfer of software development sovereignty from the tier ones to the OEMs. And that strict separation of hardware from software through a middle layer now enables independent software and hardware development processes and life cycles. I would say the analogy here is probably more like early PCs that were very custom and later then adopted standard motherboards. You're going to see a lot of analogies between vehicles today with where computers went through their journey in the past. And to make all that happen, what is key here is standardization and modularization. It's crucial.
The OEMs are going to control most of the software development, and they'll drive towards standardization of hardware and electronic modules. This is then going to provide greater value to the auto manufacturers, enabling them to drive maximum reuse across their various platform models. With the zonal architecture, there's also going to be this migration to a 48-volt system to support the system's higher power consumption requirements and the redundancy. And those 48-volt systems, they have less power loss. The key thing here is that then enables much lighter wire harnesses. In today's systems, you'll have a vehicle that has large cabling and a lot of different cabling all throughout the car. With the zonal architecture, you're going to see much fewer cable assemblies, and they'll be much lighter and easier to route throughout the vehicle. The overall benefit to the OEMs from migrating from the old architectures to this new zonal architecture is going to be significantly reduced development costs, significant reduction in the CapEx required for their factories to produce, significantly increased manufacturing efficiency, faster development cycle times, reduced inventory, all kinds of great benefits are going to come out of this. It's going to be tremendous for the OEMs. And with the smaller and shorter electrical wiring and sensors with the digital outputs, it's going to make it even easier for OEMs to add and subtract sensors to pretty much tailor the functionality targeted for each vehicle.
In fact, the economical drive they're going to have for trying to even combine multiple sensors into one package, like something that you would refer to as “combi-sensing,” that's typically done to minimize the cost of packaging or the associated complex cabling assemblies. That may reduce and go away because it's going to be easier to add and subtract individual sensors in the future. And additionally, there's this ever-increasing need for a mature understanding of functional safety requirements. Every organization around the globe pretty much has to have a trained and certified functional safety manager, or several actually, and also engineers and IC designers. They all need to be well versed in the topic of functional safety. Functional safety, I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. It's referring to a safety integrity level: SIL. And an SIL applies to a safety function from start to finish, and it pretty much affirms that the system is reverting back to a safe state or performs properly, even during incorrect operation or a loss of functionality. It's in fault tolerant architecture. Both the design and the process for product development must follow functional safety standards, and these are commissioned by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and governed by things like IEC 61508 and ISO 26262. And everyone needs to pass these independent functional safety audits in order to achieve the corresponding quantitative metrics that assess properly that you're meeting all those safety standards.
There is an ASIL decomposition. It's a technique that's used in the development of automotive systems that manages and mitigates risk, and that's associated with different functions or different components. The process involves breaking down a system with a higher ASIL requirement into much smaller parts and functions, each of which have to be assigned a lower ASIL rating in order to meet the higher-level ASIL within the vehicle. And that approach allows for more manageable and cost-effective implementation of these safety measures. ASIL is divided into four different levels. There's an A, a B, a C, and a D. ASIL D is representing the absolute highest degree of hazard control rigor, and ASIL A is the lowest. This classification helps in assessing the severity, the exposure, and controllability of potential hazards. And it guides the development process to focus on those critical safety measures. ASIL A is applied to systems where the risk is relatively low, but it still requires mitigation to ensure safety. ASIL B is for systems where there is moderate risk but requiring more stringent controls than ASIL A. ASIL C targets systems with much more considerable risk, and it demands more rigorous safety measures. And finally, ASIL D, being the highest, is reserved for the most critical systems where the risk of harm is highest and therefore necessitating the strictest of safety requirements. All these changes are really challenging engineers to better understand the details of the end application. What's required of the sensor in the system, the role, the value of those sensors and provides not only in terms of functionality and performance, but also in terms of safety, quality, reliability, weight, sustainability, and cost. There's a lot of factors that engineers have to consider when they're doing product development. As these OEMs push towards the software defined vehicle world and primarily focus on their software, their understanding and maturity level for these mechanical systems and sensors may decrease. In the past, they were doing very hardware centric developments and were really good at that. I think in the future when we go to software defined vehicles, more of that is going to be shifted to the tier ones and the system players as well as the sensor providers.