Energy efficient designs are crucial to optimizing EV performance and reducing costs.
By David Fresneau, Vice President Marketing and Business Development at Silicon Mobility, an Intel Company.
As the automotive industry navigates the shift to electric vehicles (EVs), legacy original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have the opportunity to reevaluate traditional methods and designs to ensure optimal performance, reduced material and manufacturing costs, and sustainability for the next generation of EVs. First, let’s look at what drives the barriers to streamlining costs.
Costs associated with electric vehicles
Traditionally, the primary costs associated with electric vehicles come from the battery, electric motor, electronic control units (ECUs), and siloed vehicle design architectures. First, the vehicle’s battery is the heaviest and most expensive equipment in the entire architecture. If OEMs made batteries lighter and cheaper by cutting their size, the range and performance wouldn’t be able to keep up with the daily demands most drivers require. OEMs need a solution that lightens the battery but maintains its increased range and performance, and charges faster with higher voltage.
Second, the global trend for EV adoption has drastically increased usage of rare materials to manufacture the electric motor, causing an inflation for materials like magnets, iron, and copper. The next generation of EV motors must reduce the use of rare materials without compromising the motor’s power and performance.
Third, are the hundreds of ECUs within a vehicle, each made of many components, such as the microcontroller, power devices, physical housing, and cooling solution. All these components come with a price, and when each vehicle has over hundreds of ECUs, consolidation is integral to bringing down material costs.
Lastly, is the vehicle’s design architecture— components within the vehicle are currently designed in a vacuum without consideration of the system level impacts or opportunities they may have on other elements. By redesigning the central design architecture to reduce total ECUs, OEMs can save money and improve energy efficiency.
Enhancing EV efficiency
The near-term solution to combatting these costs is to enhance the efficiency of the existing powertrain technology through energy savings at the vehicle level, including improved integration with EV station infrastructure. This is exactly the challenge that Silicon Mobility, an Intel Company, has now solved with the launch of the new OLEA U310 system-on-chip (SoC).
Representing a first for the industry, this new SoC is the only complete solution that combines hardware and software programmability in one and is engineered to match the need for powertrain domain control in electrical architectures with distributed software. Built with a unique hybrid and heterogeneous architecture that allows simultaneous control of multiple power and diverse energy functions, a single OLEA U310 FPCU can replace as many as six standard microcontrollers in a system combination in which it controls an inverter, a motor, a gearbox, a DC-DC converter, and an on-board-charger.
In addition to the bill of material reduction, early figures show up to 5% energy efficiency improvement, 25% motor downsizing for the same power, 35% less cooling need, and 50% DC-link downsizing compared todays EVs. The benefits of the new Silicon Mobility solution empower EV manufacturers to design software-defined electric vehicles with exceptional performance, improved range, and potentially lower production costs.
Drawing inspiration and moving forward
The automotive industry is in the midst of a significant transformation. From business models and supply chains to in-vehicle experiences and artificial intelligence (AI), there is not a part of the industry that isn’t undergoing some amount of change. And nowhere is that more evident than in the vehicles’ electrical/electronic (E/E) architectures themselves in their transition from internal combustion engines to EVs. The pivot is here, and vehicle manufacturers must also calculate the opportunity costs of missing the shift.
To learn more about the OLEA U310, see the press release in the Intel newsroom.