Automotive Engineering - June 2023 - 12

TECHNOLOGY REPORT
" There is a lot of manual
analysis and semi-empirical
learning going on, "
and that slows the discovery
of future problems. He
said the partnership had
the potential to cut battery
factory development
time in half.
" The electrochemistry
is new to [auto OEMs].
It's a whole other beast, "
he said, adding that there
are millions of particles in
a battery cell, and it
doesn't take many defective
ones to cause poor
performance or fires.
SAE Media also spoke
with Sholklapper in
January, when it was part
of a group of journalists
who saw a private presentation
about Voltaiq's
efforts. " The complexity
around batteries, " he said then, " is that
some in the automotive industry like to
think of them as mechanical and electrical
engineers [would], so they'll think
about them as electrical black box. The
challenge is that these are electrochemical
living and breathing organisms that
also have those mechanical properties
[expansion and contraction] you have
to deal with and electrical properties
He said early on, the
company studied two
OEMs that seemed to be
getting consistent yield
and quality out of batteries
being manufactured
for them: Tesla and
Apple.
PDF Solutions' Extensio
Voltaiq cofounders: CTO Eli Leland, left, and CEO Tal Sholklapper on a recent
visit to the University of Michigan Battery Lab pilot manufacturing line, where
companies come to prototype the ways their batteries will be manufactured.
you have to deal with. And you have to
think about all of those in parallel. "
That's where Voltaiq's Enterprise
Battery Intelligence (EBI) platform
comes in. It leverages thousands of
data points from dozens to hundreds
of cells that make up an EV battery,
taking that data at any point of the
production process and predicting future
performance and behavior.
platform has modules that
analyze data from manufacturing
stations, process
control, assembly and test
operations. Michael Yu, VP
of PDFS' Advanced
Solutions Group, said the
Voltaiq partnership would
speed its own entry in the
market. " With more than
40,000 process-, testand
assembly tools and
more than 15,000 engineers
trained worldwide,
our collaboration gets our
best-in-class semiconductor
process control methodology in the
battery manufacturing arena. "
Of the two companies' combined
efforts, Sholklapper offered a stunning
number: one of the top three automakers
recently did an analysis and concluded
that by working with Voltaiq
and PDF Solutions, they could perform
20,000 times the efficiency improvements
versus what the OEM was doing
manually.
The good news for fuVoltaiq
presented these two contrasting battery development cases. It's easy to see how early detection of
problems would save time and money
12 June 2023
ture battery quality,
Sholklapper said, is that
the automotive industry
now " gets it, " and is actively
seeking digital
strategies for in-development
and future gigafactories.
He said the new
partnership is quite scalable
due to Voltaiq's
product being mostly
software and PDF
Solutions' experience at
putting boots on the
ground at factories and
training battery engineers
to use the platforms.
Chris Clonts
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
BOTH IMAGES: VOLTAIQ

Automotive Engineering - June 2023

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