The automotive industry is undergoing significant transformations, driven by heightened competition and relentless advancements in technology. These technologies are not only transforming the physical architecture of vehicles but also redefining how they are manufactured, serviced, and interact with their users and surroundings.
Some of the key areas where new technologies are making an impact include:
- Autonomous Driving: Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are integrating advanced sensors (like LiDAR, radar and cameras) with AI-driven software to enable self-driving capabilities. This technology impacts vehicle design by necessitating robust computing platforms, sophisticated software architectures, and enhanced connectivity.
- Connected Vehicles: The rise of IoT in automobiles enables connectivity between vehicles, infrastructure, and external services. This connectivity requires new communication protocols, cybersecurity measures, and integration with cloud platforms.
- Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS): These systems, including features like adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping assist, and automatic emergency braking, rely on sensors and actuators that influence vehicle design and require integration into vehicle control systems.
- Increased Power Densities and Drive Voltages: EV powertrains are moving to higher voltages (400V to 800V or higher ) and power management systems such as onboard charging require faster and higher density power performance.
- Sustainable Practices: Environmental concerns are driving the adoption of sustainable practices in vehicle production, such as carbon neutral manufacturing, recycling materials, reducing energy consumption in manufacturing processes, and designing for end-of-life recyclability.
As a leading supplier and technology innovator in the automotive industry for over six decades, ENNOVI plays an integral role in the ideation, design, development and manufacturing of enabling solutions for virtually all these key areas throughout modern vehicles.
The following sections provide an overview of just some of the ENNOVI innovations that are already transforming the technology landscape for todays and tomorrow’s vehicles.
EV Batteries
EV batteries have been evolving along two major tracks over recent years:
- Voltage levels have been increasing to accommodate more advanced powertrains.
- The size of battery modules is increasing and how they are integrated is changing.
Cell-to-Pack (sometimes referred to as C2P or CTP) is a battery design approach that eliminates the intermediate modules and connects the battery cells directly to the pack. This reduces the weight, size, and cost of the battery and increases its energy density and efficiency. Another related approach called Cell-to-Chassis (CTC) integrates the battery cells directly into the EV chassis. Both CTP and CTC are driven by benefits from eliminating the material and cabling needed to protect and connect separate modules within the overall battery pack. While modules have been steadily getting larger to support higher power requirements, CTP and CTC take a leap forward by eliminating the modules completely.
To accommodate these architectural changes automotive OEMs and Tier 1 battery suppliers look to ENNOVI for innovative, reliable, and configurable technologies.
Our family of advanced cell contacting systems, ENNOVI-CellConnect, leads the way in delivering cost-effective and highly customizable solutions for integrating virtually any size and configuration of battery system.
Cell contacting systems accommodate cylindrical or prismatic battery cells and are scalable to handle large battery packs up to 2.5 meters long, using ENNOVI’s precision manufacturing capabilities.
The systems provide both light weight and strength, with excellent current density spread and low-loss energy transfer. ENNOVI’s patented U-Turn technology also minimizes hot spots for better performance and longer lifecycles.
In addition, these other busbar technologies can be deployed to address the connections between battery modules.
- Powder coated busbars, PVC dipped busbars and Busbars with Heat Shrinking provide good insulation but don’t deliver the highest conductivity and may lack cost effectiveness due to the need for secondary manufacturing operations.
- Extruded Busbars – ENNOVI’s new high voltage extruded busbarscan provide a useful blend of high conductivity, insulation, thermal performance, and reliability along with moderate cost effectiveness and ability to be shaped for custom applications.
Drivetrains and Traction Motors
ENNOVI’s solutions supporting EV powertrains and traction motors range across a variety of power connector and busbar technologies, including the following:
Motor Stator Busbars: Overall, the trend in EV powertrain design is towards higher voltage architectures, improved power density, and reduced size and weight.
ENNOVI motor stators give designers the flexibility to rapidly implement advanced multi-phase motors for optimizing current flow, compact form factors, robust thermal performance, faster assembly, and overall lower cost of deployment.
Phase Busbars: Using multi-layer construction, high performance copper, stamped motor stators include options for integrating high dielectric insulators and offer a variety of connection techniques.
Connection methods include multi-phase stator bars to handle 3-phase or 6-phase application requirements, along with options for brazing, pluggable, laser welding or bolt-on.
Wide Range of Busbar Technologies
Over six decades of creating robust and configurable busbar designs for automotive applications, ENNOVI has developed a deep portfolio of busbar technologies.
- Bare busbars were the early default providing high conductivity, but issues with lack of insulation and reliability over extended lifespans led to development of other alternatives.
- Overmolded busbars –These address the need for insulation along with high conductivity and reliability but lack cost effectiveness and thermal performance.
- Flexible Busbars – ENNOVI’s flex busbar technologies give designers a wide range of options for mitigating the impacts of vibration and shock in harsh automotive environments, while providing consistent electrical conductivity.
By combining stacked, high-conductivity, flexible lamels with rigid connectors on each end, these busbar designs deliver high power transmission, vibration mitigation, thermal compensation, and robust connections to the power sources. This makes them perfect for wherever heavy vibration or pronounced thermal expansion occurs.
Power Busbar Connectors: Accommodating power connections to PCB assemblies is a critical element for implementing automotive systems such as onboard EV charging functions. ENNOVI-BusMate, our proven power busbar connectors are designed to deliver an ultra-small footprint to conserve PCB space while also providing reliable, long-life, pluggable power interfaces with large offset and angular matting tolerances.
To accommodate a range of applications, ENNOVI-BusMate power couplers are available in SMT format 40-80 Amps or proven eye-of-the-needle solderless Press-Fit interfaces 40- 60Amps.
Power Electronics and Sub-Systems
The ongoing electrification of virtually all onboard automotive systems is driving the need for a vast range of proven solutions to accommodate higher power densities, tight spacing, high pin counts, and optimal design flexibility. In working with automotive customers for over 60 years and across thousands of projects, ENNOVI has developed the largest selection of power and signaling connectivity solutions in the industry.
High-Pin-Count Solutions: For high-speed signaling in robust packaging, our high-pin-count solutions bring dense pin-counts to small-footprint applications.
As decades-long leader in both Press-Fit interconnects and molded connector assemblies, ENNOVI created these integrated connectors using Press-Fit technology to reduce manufacturing cost and improve reliability by eliminating soldering and curing times, while also preventing the risk for de-positioning of the pins during final over-molding processes.
Multi-Row Board-to-Board Connectors: With our proprietary snap-in biscuit design, our ENNOVI-MB2B, multi-row board-to-board connector, allow multiple connector units to be snapped together without solder.
Communications and ECUs
Many of the technologies noted above also play important roles for implementing onboard communications and interfaces between systems and ECUs throughout the vehicle.
For example, ENNOVI provides solutions for zonal connectivity by adapting our high pin-count technologies to create the industry’s first automotive-compliant, 10Gbps ethernet, pluggable connectors using solderless Press-Fit pins.
The ENNOVI engineering team developed an efficient, patent-pending manufacturing technique for stitching Press-Fit terminals directly into the housings, which both increases manufacturing throughput and secures positioning of the pins to prevent movement. This direct stitch method provides a significant improvement over the previous reel-to-reel molding process.
Also, ENNOVI technologies are helping enable the trend towards consolidating multiple electronic control units (ECUs) into fewer, more powerful units. This reduces complexity, weight, and wiring harnesses in vehicles. As vehicles become more autonomous and connected, ECUs also require greater processing power. High-performance processors and GPUs are being integrated into ECUs to handle complex algorithms for autonomous driving, AI-driven features, and real-time data processing.
This move to more powerful ECUs is already taking advantage of key ENNOVI technologies including high pin-count headers, multi-row board-to-board connectors, press-fit interconnects and advanced molding processes.
Sensors for ADAS and Autonomous Driving
The evolution of ADAS and autonomous driving systems is not only dependent on the technologies described above for enabling more robust onboard communication and faster ECUs; it also requires advanced technology solutions for integrating and connecting sensors, such as cameras, LiDAR, and radar, throughout the vehicle.
These sensors work together in a sensor fusion process, where data from multiple sources are integrated and analyzed to create a comprehensive understanding of the vehicle’s environment. This integrated data enables ADAS features such as adaptive cruise control, automatic emergency braking, lane-keeping assist, and ultimately, will enable higher levels of autonomy in self-driving vehicles.
Radar Interconnect: A prime example of how automotive sensors can be cost-effectively integrated is the ENNOVI Radar Interconnect module, which houses and protects radar sensors from heat issues, electro-magnetic interference, vibration and shock.
Integrated with solder-free ENNOVI Press-Fit Technology, our automotive-approved Radar Interconnects are tough, compact and cost-effective.
To mitigate whiskering, they come with the option for IndiCoat™, our whisker mitigation plating technology.
Summary
As automotive manufacturers strive to thrive in an increasingly competitive global marketplace, they need to innovate faster, while at the same time reducing costs and ramping up new innovations more quickly to volume production.
They also need to assure customers that their vehicles are robust, reliable and will deliver flawless performance over extended periods.
To achieve this balance, automakers cannot afford to start every new enhancement completely from scratch. But at the same time, they need to differentiate themselves from the competition.
ENNOVI’s core mission is to provide leading edge innovation while also being customizable and designed for fast integration with each automaker’s specific requirements.
By partnering with ENNOVI, customers can benefit from our industry-leading expertise in high-precision mechanical engineering, molding, and volume production. Our global footprint and local facilities also offer the best blend of scale, logistics efficiency, and responsiveness.
