How Voltaic Reduced Inverter Validation Time by 85%
Voltaic's EV powertrain team switched from PLECS to AUV and cut their traction inverter simulation time from 3 weeks to 2 days — enabling twice as many design iterations per sprint.
“AUV completely changed our development velocity. We went from dreading simulation runs to trusting them as our primary validation tool.”
The Challenge
Voltaic Power's EV powertrain team was designing a next-generation 400V/800V dual-voltage traction inverter for a major European OEM. Their existing workflow relied on PLECS for system-level simulation and LTspice for device-level analysis — a fragmented approach that created bottlenecks at every design review.
The primary challenges were simulation speed (each full-load thermal simulation took 45 minutes in PLECS), convergence failures during transient events, and the inability to capture switching transients with the ideal switch models available in PLECS.
The Solution
After a technical evaluation, Voltaic's team migrated to AUV's simulation platform. The key factors in their decision were the DSED solver speed, physical switch model accuracy, and integrated electro-thermal co-simulation.
Migration Process
The migration took approximately two weeks. AUV's topology import tool handled the schematic conversion, and the team used AUV's SiC MOSFET library (with pre-validated models for the Wolfspeed C3M series they were using) to replace the ideal switches.
The Results
The impact was immediate. Full-load thermal simulations that previously took 45 minutes completed in under 3 minutes. The team went from running 2-3 simulation iterations per day to 15-20, enabling them to explore a much wider design space within each sprint cycle.
More importantly, the physical switch models revealed a reverse recovery issue in their low-side gate drive timing that the ideal models had hidden. Catching this in simulation saved an estimated $200K in prototype costs and 6 weeks of debug time.
AUV completely changed our development velocity. We went from dreading simulation runs to trusting them as our primary validation tool.
Today, Voltaic's entire powertrain team (12 engineers) runs AUV as their primary simulation platform. They've since expanded its use to their onboard charger and DC-DC converter product lines.