Infineon OPTIREG PMIC integrates power and safety for EV traction inverters

What it means for hiring

Infineon's OPTIREG TLE9744QK puts the isolated supply rails, the resolver excitation and an independent safety engine for a traction inverter ECU into one PMIC, and claims up to seventy percent less board area for the functions it replaces. The safety logic watches phase currents, DC-link voltage and the state of the MCU and gate drivers, and can force a safe state by itself, with a redundant supply so it survives losing the main low-voltage rail. It is designed for ASIL-D under ISO 26262.

Every function that moves into a supplier's silicon takes a piece of the safety case with it. The inverter team no longer designs the resolver driver or the independent monitoring path; it inherits them, together with a safety manual, an FMEDA and a list of assumptions of use that somebody has to check against the real system. That changes who is hard to hire. Board-level analogue work shrinks a little, and the functional safety engineer who can argue an ASIL-D case built on somebody else's mechanism becomes the name on the critical path. Tier ones who already queue for those people will find that integration raises the bar for the role rather than removing it.

Read the original at eeNews Europe .