Stefania Botta is a Process Quality System Representative of Product and Process Development at Marelli. In this interview, Stefania talks about her experience as a woman in STEM and as a member of the MASTECS team.
How did you become interested in engineering and HPC? What was your motivation to choose your career path?
From elementary school, I have matured a love for mathematical and logical disciplines. Therefore, my studies have continued along this line and kind of interest and I’ve chosen to study and work in STEM with good personal results and satisfaction.
Have you encountered or faced any challenges while working in STEM?
In my opinion, I believe that the best place to work is a company that targets to achieve gender balance at all levels. I’m convinced that a gender-balanced company has more opportunities than other companies due to its diversity and different perspectives. In any case, I’ve always been respected by colleagues throughout my career. From my experience, what it’s not so easy to do it's to balance family and work life. I think women should be recognized in their roles as workers and mothers at the same time, and consequently, be helped through more services & benefits and be encouraged to further develop their careers.
Where and how do you see MASTECS technology been developed 5 years from now?
The architectural design on multicore microcontrollers is a new challenge and the tools that are currently available in the market do not fulfill the automotive design requirements and the current weaknesses can lead to late problem detection and expensive reworks. The MASTECS technology will allow anticipating the analysis of different architecture solutions in order to find the best solution during an early phase, so benefiting by avoiding costly rollback cycles. Moreover, MASTECS results, especially the 'ISO 26262 tool qualification,' will help the tier one suppliers to develop products that meet higher ASIL levels, in line with emerging customer requirements and a timing analysis process and tooling certified for use within an 'ISO 26262 process' is a key enabler to compete in the new automated software-intensive automotive market.
What impact do you believe MASTECS technology will have from an innovation perspective?
As the Marelli Project Leader for MASTECS, I can say that MASTECS will help the automotive sector to properly exploit the potential of multicore to be compliant with safety regulation (ISO 26262), nowadays mandatory in this market. The future of powerful critical embedded systems depends on using multicore processors, but today the computational capacity of these advanced platforms cannot be fully exploited, limiting their competitiveness. MASTECS builds on the Rapita Verification Suite (RVS) and BSC’s Multicore Benchmark technology (MμBT) to create a fully-fledged, industrial-quality multicore timing analysis (MTA) approach, with an exceptional level of automation, and full traceability of analysis requirements into evidence as required for certification of critical software. Moreover, I believe that with different contributions from companies and universities, MASTECS can hit its target to improve the automotive market by providing this new technological solution.
Do you have any advice or message for young girls and women pursuing a career in STEM?
I sure have some insights to share, from my experience, women that follow this kind of study are women with an excellent career because they are very prepared, motivated, and strong. Moreover, we are living in a historical period of the technology revolution, and these types of knowledge will be essential for future jobs. Therefore, I believe that women cannot lose this amazing opportunity for themselves and society as a whole. In order to achieve that, it is fundamental that the educational system and society invest in our children, from an early age, to spread technological culture thus avoiding gender differences. I think that this is the key to draw our daughters to the STEM world.
