Silicon Craft Technology

Electric Vehicles and Structural Electronics- Insights and Top Trends

Recently, the good news has been the continued strong growth of the market for hybrid cars, buses and outdoor forklifts, premium-priced pure electric cars and pure electric vehicles of many other types from the newly popular electric motorcycles to mobile cranes, mobility vehicles for the disabled and microEVs. On the negative side, the oversupplied e-bike/ e-scooter business remained almost entirely loss-making Chinese suppliers of the Chinese market where growth eased and companies left the business. Mainstream pure electric cars remained a failure due to up-front price too high, resale price too low (those short-lived batteries) and range too short. The term "structural electronics" is little known despite being used for several years, notably in terms of specifics such as "structural sensors" and "structural batteries". Google has tens of millions of items on the subject and, more importantly, in 2014, it started to be realised that this is to be something big.

IDTechEx explains technology roadmap for electric vehicles

Simple things are being applied to reduce purchase price, increase resale price and extend range of electric cars

Electric Vehicle News from Hybrid & EV Forum Munich Day One 17 Sept.

The event Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Forum consisted a conference with about 70 delegates and a small display area for a few organisations. It was very pan European with delegates from the UK to the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Russia and Romania but also further afield such as Japan, South Korea and the USA - professors, industrialists and developers. Here we give some details of the presentations that particularly caught our attention.

Highlights from Hybrid & EV Forum Munich 2014

The event Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Forum consisted a conference with about 70 delegates and a small display area for a few organisations. Here we give some details of the presentations that particularly caught our attention.

IDTechEx sees Zytek as an indicator of latest power electronics trends

The market for electric vehicle inverters, both hybrid and pure electric, will grow from around $2.8 billion in 2013 to an estimated $4.2 billion in 2023 as discussed in the IDTechEx report, "Power Electronics for Electric Vehicles 2013-2023: Forecasts, Technologies, Players."

IDTechEx: Electric Cars Reinvented - $178.9 Billion Market

IDTechEx finds that the global sale of hybrid and pure electric cars will triple to $178.9 billion in 2024 as they are transformed in most respects.

Toyota's diamond-like semiconductor wafer boosts hybrid mileage

Toyota is using one of the hardest materials in nature after diamonds to develop a semiconductor it hopes will improve the fuel efficiency of its hybrids, such as the Prius, by as much at 10 percent.

New generation GaN and SiC semiconductors will be designed into EVs

SiC devices will be widely designed into electric vehicles from 2014 and GaN from 2018. With manufacturers currently designing vehicles to be launched onto the market in 2018, it is predicted that by this date GaN semiconductors will attain price parity with silicon devices. This will make the technology attractive as a replacement for silicon for use in the power electronics in both pure electric and hybrid vehicles.

IDTechEx forecast increasing adoption of wide band gap semiconductors

Today, Wide Band Gap (WBG) semiconductors offer new opportunities to achieve unprecedented performance while using less electricity.

IDTechEx find industrial and commercial EVs are the winners

As the electric vehicle EV industry grows more than five-fold to well over $300 billion in 2024, those e-vehicles not bought primarily on up-front price will continue to dominate.

Haydale Ltd

Haydale is a UK-based company producing single and multi-walled carbon nanotubes as well as multi-layered graphene nanoplatellets. They have a plasma-based production process and can functionalise graphene nanoplatellets and CNTs in-situ. They have also recently launched an ink formulation in collaboration with Gwent Electronic Materials

Further lessons from the European Electric Vehicle Congress, Brussels

Dr Peter Harrop, Chairman IDTechEx reports on the latest EV developments from the European Electric Vehicle Congress held in Brussels recently.

Lessons from EU Project Day on eMobility

In Brussels, Belgium, on November 19, there was a day devoted to presenting most of the European Union projects on eMobility. This is a term used in Continental Europe to mean what they call Full Electric Vehicles (FEV) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEV), mainly on-road.

eCarTec Munich - a mixed picture

IDTechEx's Chairman, Dr Peter Harrop provides a snapshot of his insight into eCarTech held in Munich this week.

EpiGaN starts production on Research Campus Hasselt

The new production site of EpiGaN was officially opened in the presence of Flemish Minister Mrs Ingrid Lieten and Limburg Governor Mr Herman Reynders. The company selected the Research Campus Hasselt as the ideal location for the volume production of their gallium nitride epitaxial material.

Power Integrations strategic investment in semisouth laboratories

Clean-Tech Innovators Join Forces in $30M Partnership to Accelerate Development of Energy-Efficient Power Devices for Solar, Wind & Hybrid/Electric Auto Industries Investment.

Baumann photovoltaic division adds new handling modules

Amberg based equipment vendor baumann extends the range of modules for its automation systems for crystalline solar cell manufacturing.

Again - IBM claim world's fastest graphene transistor

IBM believe they have achieved the highest cut-off frequency so far for any graphene device of 100 billion cycles/second (100 GigaHertz).