Renesas Electronics Corporation, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, on April 10, 2017, announced its new 100 kW class inverter solution that achieves industry-leading small design class of 3.9 liter (L) for high-power 100 kW class motors in mid- to large-sized hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) including SUVs, and mid- to small-sized electric vehicles (EVs).
Renesas will provide the new solution as a solution kit that includes software that maximizes the HEV/EV motor performance and hardware components such as microcontrollers (MCUs), Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) and fast recovery diode (FRD), and other power semiconductor devices.
The new solution enables system developers to reduce development time for various development steps: from specifications analysis, to hardware/software development and motor characteristic adjustments. This shortens, for example, the prototyped inverter system development period from two – to three years to just one year, a reduction of over 50 percent, thereby significantly contribute to the reduction of the development cycle and costs.
CO2 emissions are rising due to abnormal weather events caused by global warming and increased levels of environmental pollution. For the automotive industry, this is driving increasing demand for broad adoption of electrically powered systems, such as HEV and EVs, at an earlier stage to reduce these emissions.
In an electrically powered system, the inverter plays a key role converting direct current (DC) power to alternating current and sends out optimum current to the motor whose rotation speed varies according to the driving conditions. Therefore, to realize an inverter system with higher fuel and electric power efficiency, high precision and high efficiency of the motor drive in addition to miniaturization of the inverter is required to allow mounting of the electric unit in the limited space of the engine room for every type and size of vehicle model. Renesas’ new inverter solution addresses these needs.
Renesas has been releasing inverters and solution kits with various capacity designs. In 2014, Renesas developed a solution that realized a size of 2.9 L in the 50 kW class. To respond to the growing needs for large-output motors for use in large vehicles, Renesas has expanded its lineup to support these large-output motors with its new 100 kW class inverter solution included with a motor calibration tool.
