OREANDA-NEWS. September 14, 2015. Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) is demonstrating its industry-leading programmable logic solutions for electric and hybrid vehicle powertrains and battery management systems at the Electric & Hybrid Technology Expo 2015, being held at the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi, Michigan, from September 14 to 17. Visit the Altera booth (#737A) to learn how Altera FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) can improve system performance, accelerate time-to-market, and reduce total cost of ownership for automotive designs.

Demonstrations at the Altera booth include:

  • Tandem Motion-Power 48V prototyping board that uses Altera’s Max® 10 FPGA and controls a dual axis motor with DC/DC conversion (12V to 48V), and which supports optional battery power capability.
  • Battery Management System (BMS) that uses an FPGA-powered SOC (state of charge) estimator, running on an Altera Cyclone® V SoC (system on chip) that demonstrates the high accuracy and breakthrough performance of FPGA-enabled electric vehicle BMS systems, developed by  the University of Pisa, Italy.
  • New Charging Curve Analysis (CCA) Technology that uses an Altera Cyclone V FPGA to provide a much more accurate estimation of the battery’s SOC and SOH (state of health). This patented technology allows maximum utilization of battery capacity within minimum error of estimation even after a long life usage cycle.
According to Tak Ikushima, Sr. Marketing Manager in the Automotive Business Unit at Altera, “Microcontrollers used to be sufficient, but they are now hitting a ceiling in performance as automotive applications become smarter and more demanding. Altera is seeing a lot of opportunities in this area because FPGAs offer parallel processing without much power being dissipated, and they are also more deterministic in real-time, which allow them to process higher performance computations.”