Battery Management System "Start Again"
Back
2023/08/24 15:13:54
Although the epidemic has caused a huge impact on the global auto market, the new energy vehicle market is acting against the trend. Li Xiaohe, vice president and general manager of the drive and energy systems product line at NXP Semiconductors, said that the further strengthening of regulatory requirements, the significant reduction in battery costs, the improvement of driving range and charging speed, and the increasing richness of electric vehicles are superimposed factors that jointly drive the new "horsepower" of electric vehicles.
The key system, the battery management system (BMS), also "follows the trend". The recent news that Volkswagen has adopted NXP's battery management solution on its MEB electric vehicle platform has brought BMS to the fore again. It is reported that the MEB platform is a cross-brand, cross-model platform, and Volkswagen will be based on the platform to introduce up to 75 fully electric vehicle models to the market in the future. The reason why we got this big single, in Li Xiaohe's words, is because NXP BMS solved the "pain point" in the process of electrification of vehicle manufacturers, which contains what kind of "secret"?
New energy vehicles' pain points'
It is important to understand that when electric vehicles become popular, automakers have "uniformly" increased investment in electrification from an economic and compliance point of view, but to reach the "inflection point" of the outbreak, there are many challenges to overcome.
As a "must-have" for electric vehicles, even though battery costs are constantly optimized, they still account for a quarter to a third of the total vehicle cost.
Li Xiaohe believes that the continuous reduction of battery costs is an important decisive point for the popularity of electric vehicles and the profitability of the entire vehicle factory, in addition to the cost reduction of the battery cell, but also to continue to optimize or simplify the electronic and electrical and mechanical architecture, and continue to upgrade the level of automated assembly on the production line, so as to improve production efficiency.
The "effort" to be made in terms of mileage and charging is naturally to extend the range and shorten the charging time. "From an electrochemical point of view, extending the range to increase the specific energy, shorten the charging time to increase the specific power, in the process of gradually challenging the specific energy and specific power limits, the level of functional safety of battery management, diagnostic accuracy and speed become increasingly important." Li Xiaohe mentioned.
In order to accelerate the mass production of different levels of electric vehicles, platformization is crucial. A car factory may have to produce dozens or even hundreds of different models in a short period of time, including pure trams, plug-in hybrids, 48V hybrids, 14V start-stop micro-hybrids, etc., so whether it can achieve maximum reuse and application platform, in order to speed up the time to market and reduce research and development costs in the race to win.
With the rapid growth of the electric vehicle market, the large-scale matching ability test of the supply chain also follows. Li Xiaohe's point of view is that a few years ago, the production scale of large automakers was at most a few hundred thousand electric vehicles a year, but in the future, mainstream automakers plan to rise to the scale of millions of vehicles. This large-scale production competition is not only the performance of a single product itself, but also a comprehensive test of semiconductor manufacturers' automotive manufacturing quality, production quality, supply system and pre-sales and after-sales service capabilities.
BMS breaking down
The electrification challenge mentioned above involves not only a series of issues such as architecture and batteries, but also BMS.
Li Xiaohe pointed out that the cost and performance of the battery itself is one of the key points for the factory to win, and the safety performance and efficiency of the battery are largely reflected by the improvement of the BMS system. "Although BMS accounts for a very small proportion of the total cost of the battery, about 10%-20%, but it can improve the range of the battery pack or speed up the charging performance, or improve the life of the value it can create is very high, and there is still a lot of future." Li Xiaohe bluntly.
On the one hand, the eternal pursuit of electric vehicles is to improve mileage and accelerate fast charging speed, to accurate battery management, through accurate SoC estimation to improve the charging state and battery health state estimation, so that you can optimize the range, extend the service life and improve safety without new costs; In the path of using more radical chemical materials to do cells to improve specific energy and specific power, there will be more obvious risk factors, such as overvoltage, overcharge, unstable chemicals, thermal runaway, etc., which requires BMS to have faster diagnostic speed and more accurate sensing and measurement of voltage, current, temperature and even pressure.
On the other hand, the vehicle power lithium-ion battery has hundreds or even thousands of cells, and there is a wooden barrel effect in cell management, and the weakest cell determines the limit of the entire battery charge and discharge. Therefore, the balance of multiple cells is also extremely important, which can help improve the life and capacity of the battery.
In the face of these challenges, NXP, which has worked in the field of automotive electronics for many years, relies on its own core advantages, competitiveness and unique value proposition, and offers BMS tools that can comprehensively solve the above pain points.
Li Xiaohe said that the BMS method includes processors, on-board network sensors, drivers, analog front ends, and battery management with active safety functions, and NXP can provide a comprehensive overall solution.
From the point of view of vehicle plant demand, NXP's approach has also achieved "everything". Li Xiaohe specifically explained that from the accuracy point of view, NXP's controller, simulator, etc., can not only ensure the factory accuracy of the chip, but also ensure the use of the product life cycle accuracy; At the security level, NXP provides customers with appropriate embedded software driver support, including functional safety libraries, to better enable system-level solutions. In addition, the meaning of NXP products can take into account 14V, 48V, 400V, 800V and a variety of different modes, and the scalability and scalability of the hardware and software platform can help customers to reuse and reuse software and hardware, reduce validation time and accelerate time to market. In particular, the research and development and iteration cycle of new energy vehicles has been shortened from about 4 years of traditional cars to two years, which more reflects the importance of systematic solutions.
It is particularly important that NXP is a leading supplier of automotive semiconductors, with good supply capacity and complete service system, both authorized design support and after-sales quality support, which can be fully guaranteed, which is crucial to accelerate the mass production of new energy vehicles.
Next stop "Wild Hope"
Regarding the potential of electric vehicles, NXP has demonstrated its "core" aspiration with practical actions.
Because the potential of electric vehicles is being doubled. Li Xiaohe mentioned that from the global average cost point of view, the industry generally believes that if the cost per kilowatt-hour is below $100, then the cost of a battery car is basically similar to that of ordinary fuel vehicles. The average cost this year is around $130, and by 2024, the cost of electric vehicles and conventional fuel vehicles will converge. The new energy vehicle market will maintain a blowout state in the next decade, and the focus will also be on the creation of more optimized system costs, higher safety and higher reliability. Correspondingly, BMS is also promising, and will rise to tens of millions of sets a year.
Volkswagen's MEB electric vehicle platform "locked" NXP, it is obvious that NXP's BMS stands at a new high point, and NXP has a higher goal and ambition.
From the point of view of the chip required for the BMS system, Li Xiaohe mentioned that the main controller optimized for battery management is very similar to the main controller architecture with functional safety such as power and transmission assembly control, but it needs to be optimized on the hardware configuration such as memory, safety verification, and low power consumption. NXP is also developing the next generation of the S32MCU, with several products of the S32K family of MCUS specifically optimized for battery management. And key chips such as analog front-end chips will also continue to optimize, in the level of high precision, balance, and security continue to work.
Regarding the availability of battery pack support for different technology routes in the market, NXP's response is also positive. Li Xiaohe mentioned that at present, the overall technical solution of the battery is still evolving, and all kinds of electrochemistry are in a state of cooperation and competition, whether it is iron lithium-ion batteries or solid-state batteries. NXP's BMS system is trying to support a variety of electrochemistry, that is, the battery packs used in new energy vehicles on the market are supported, of course, the design and accuracy requirements will also be higher.
From a global perspective, China is still an important driving market for new energy vehicles. The recent announcement of the "New energy Automobile Industry Development Plan (2021-2035)" will usher in a new round of development peak for new energy vehicles in China. It is estimated that in 2025, the annual sales of new energy vehicles in China will exceed 5 million.
Related to global customers, different forces of domestic new energy vehicles also show different tensions. Li Xiaohe stressed that NXP has a very strong technical team in China, including software, hardware, testing, etc., in addition to a very complete technical accumulation of reference design. For companies with strong design capabilities, they pay more attention to design, cost, safety and quality. Startups are more focused on speed, time to market, and more focused on software and services. NXP has established strong interactions and collaborations with both major automakers and startups, allowing customers to focus on high value-added application development through a system-level chipset approach and software support. (Proofread/request)
Previous
