AbstractsEngineering

In-vehicle systems on silicon became very popular when high-voltage (HV) technologies were affordable owing to the evolution of silicon semiconductor technology. However, the transistors of these HV processes usually are constrained by voltage limitations between certain terminals therewith. To overcome the limitation as well as secure the reliability, this thesis proposes many HV protection designs used in automobile networking systems and battery management systems. This thesis firstly presents a FlexRay transceiver implemented by a HV CMOS process compliant with FlexRay physical layer standards. Notably, over-voltage detectors, HV diodes, and HV ESDs are proposed therewith to protect the FlexRay transceiver from HV hazards. Meanwhile, a voltage monitoring IC used in in-vehicle battery management systems is also proposed in this thesis, where HV multiplexer is used to convert the voltage of battery module into the input range of ADCs. The HV transceivers can transmit and receive data between adjacent voltage monitoring ICs without the presence of any HV isolators. Finally, the FlexRay transceiver and voltage monitoring IC both are implemented using HV processes to justify their performance. Measurement results include functional verification to communicate with commercially available FlexRay transceivers, and reliability test given in -40 ~ +125â temperature range. Notably, an experimental prototype of voltage monitoring IC can monitor a series of 8 batteries and transmit/receive data with a common mode voltage between -32 ~ +32 V.