TechDay: EV/HEV Cost vs. Performance Trade-off: A Battle on Multiple Fronts For Power Electronics

Electric and Hybrid Vehicles (EV/HEVs) have featured an extraordinary market growth and are poised to do so in the coming years. This booming market associated with evolving customers’ needs and incentive mechanisms and strong technology challenges calls for technology innovations and car OEMs’ strategy adaptation. Amongst the main EV/HEV challenges is how to achieve CO2 emissions reduction and the highest added value for an electrified vehicle user in a most cost-effective way.

Different approaches to achieve the aforementioned goals include stronger electrification level, higher level of system integration, increased battery voltage, increased battery size, adoption of SiC and GaN technologies… The choice of different approaches and associated technology trends have strong impact on competitive positioning at all levels of the automotive supply chain.  The strategy of automotive players should be adapted consequently.

Yole Développement provides an overview of different approaches and analyses their advantages and drawbacks from the point of view of automotive OEMs, Tier1 companies and car users.

The progress of electric and hybrid electric vehicles (EV/HEVs) pushes the electronic systems to meet new requirements regarding both performance and reliability.

Since the early stages of car electrification, power modules plays a key role in the performances optimization from inverters to bi-directional converters.

Design and packaging these modules has become critical due to several technical aspects such as thermal efficiency and system integration. At the same time cost impact on the final solution is a more and more stringent issues to remain competitive in the open market. Manufacturers offers different innovating solutions, from to integrated heatsink, through die attach, at discrete as at module level. Moreover the request of cost saving integrations pushes designer to go towards single and more flexible design, such as 1-in 1 commutation cells or embedded discrete.

System Plus Consulting proposes an overview of the recent technical solution proposed by integrators and their impact on final cost.

Patent analysis provides global technological trends as well as valuable insights on the strategy of players. Interestingly, it can help to early detect weak signals related to technology adoption. More in details, patent analysis can address the following questions:

Knowmade will answer these questions and provide another approach to analyze the latest trends regarding emerging technologies in power electronics for EV/HEV.  

To fully utilize the performance of up to date semiconductors a tailor-made power module package is required. Danfoss Silicon Power developed a power module technology platform for 400V and 800V automotive systems which can be used with Si-IGBT as well as with SiC semiconductors. The presentation will outline major performance parameters, e.g. electrical performance, thermal cycling capability and cooling topics.