New software from Silicon Mobility ‘drastically improves’ power flow and range of electric and hybrid vehicles

Silicon Mobility has released new software for the industry’s first automotive field programmable controller unit which the company says “enables higher yield power conversion for electric and hybrid vehicles”. 

Silicon Mobility, a developer of control solutions for cleaner mobility, says its new software, OLEA LIB DC/DC, an addition to the Silicon Mobility OLEA FPCU, enables customers to design highly efficient DC/DC converters for hybrid and electric vehicles.

Electric and hybrid vehicle performance are mainly characterized by their energy usage efficiency. 

The longer the range of electric vehicles and best fuel economy for hybrids are the key indicators for best in class vehicle models.

However, electrical powertrain systems currently contain several electrical functions that greatly suffer from important energy losses in today’s power conversion systems controlling power flow.

The numerous alternations between motion and regenerative flows during a simple journey in city traffic produce many transient states where power conversion yield drastically drops, wasting a rare and valued embedded resource: the energy.

Now these power conversion shortcomings have been eliminated, claims Silicon Mobility.

The company says its OLEA LIB DC/DC software library optimized for the OLEA Field Programmable Control Unit is dedicated to the design of highly efficient DC/DC converters.

Together with OLEA LIB Inverter (introduced in 2017), these revolutionary technologies increase yield in transient state by over 250 percent and add up to 32 percent of range extension to electric and hybrid vehicles measured by the newly established WLTP emission test cycle.

Silicon Mobility OLEA technology virtually eliminates the power conversion drop with optimum conversion yields in transient states while improving the power conversion yield in steady state.

OLEA LIB DC/DC features and benefits:

• Significant electric and hybrid vehicle range extension.
• Highly efficient power conversion in all states significantly reducing power loss.
• Advanced control of power switches in all technologies (Si IGBT, GaN, SiC).
• Software library optimized for OLEA® FPCU enabling fast application development
• Includes state-of-the-art buck-boost valley current and voltage control.
• Capability to control power switches up to 500 KHz switching frequency and up to 6 phases in parallel.
• Design complexity and electronic control unit (ECU) size are reduced
• All extra external digital signal processors (DSP) and field programmable gate array (FPGA) are eliminated.

Bruno Paucard, CEO, Silicon Mobility, says: “With our full stack product line, Silicon Mobility not only drastically improves the performance, control and range of electric and hybrid drivetrain.

“With our new DC/DC Library, we demonstrate that reach technology content can be made directly by customers with ease.”

OLEA LIB DC/DC comes fully equipped with the building blocks for reference and target models for MatLab Simulink.

The models are designed to enable tuning and calibration from software-in-the-loop to hardware-in-the-loop simulations.

The company demonstrated its new software to select customers for evaluation at the recent Embedded World in Germany.