Increased interest in electric vehicles (EVs) has been fueled by rising gasoline costs, improving battery technology, and growing environmental awareness.
As the demand for EVs grows, virtual prototyping (VP)—a highly advanced technology based on artificial intelligence—is gaining traction among EVs. Virtual prototyping is a deep technology that entails modeling a system, simulating, and visualizing its behavior under real-world operating conditions, and iteratively revising its design.
Automotive, yellow commodities, shipbuilding, aircraft, oil & gas, transportation, and defense are among the industries that use virtual prototyping.
In automobile mechanics, virtual prototyping does not create a physical product for testing and evaluation, but rather does these operations on a computer screen.
Let’s understand more about virtual prototyping and how it is integrating with the electric vehicles market lately.
The Need for Virtual Prototyping
One of the key objectives of virtual prototyping is to eradicate the need for actual prototypes. It also helps in lowering the operational cost and time involved in developing new products.
Virtual prototyping aims to build a virtual environment in which the construction of a new model can be flexible and speedy, and experimentation on the model's kinematics, dynamics, and control can be carried out efficiently.
This type of vehicle modeling enables engineering teams to create, test, and realistically mimic design prototypes on their computers, both visually and numerically. Before developing an actual hardware prototype, the full-motion behavior of complex mechanical systems can be studied.
Users can easily test and refine many design alternatives until system performance is totally optimized. This can help reduce the time and expenses of developing new products while also improving the overall quality of system designs.
North America Wining the Virtual Prototyping Market Race
As per a detailed study conducted by analysts at BIS Research, the global virtual prototyping market for electric vehicles is estimated to reach $5.6 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 33.83%. The forecast period for this market growth is 2021-2030.
In terms of electric car production and distribution, North America is now the most advanced and competitive automotive market. The region's booming production of electric vehicles is due to the presence of automotive manufacturers such as Ford, Tesla, GM, and Fiat Chrysler.
Manufacturers are increasingly focusing on the exponential power of information and communication technologies (ICT) with its associated high-performance computing (HPC), machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Synopsys Emerging as the Leader in Virtual Prototyping for Electric Vehicles
Synopsys, as the market leader in electronic design automation (EDA), provides a diverse set of technologies and tools that may help solve complicated design and verification problems.
Building a single virtual prototype for EV design and verification necessitates a combination of technologies to cover the entire system to software spectrum. This includes electro-mechanical components and intricate interactions between embedded software and hardware components.
Synopsys products such as SaberRD, Silver, VirtualizerTM, and TestWeaver are used to build such a prototype. This depicts a basic EV product, including the mechanical hardware, electrical, and power electrics required, and typical automotive open system architecture (AUTOSAR) application software stack operating on a microcontroller from the bottom up.
Synopsys Saber is a proven platform for creating, modeling, and simulating physical systems, allowing for full-system virtual prototyping in analog/power electronics, electronic power generation/conversion/distribution, system/wiring/harness design, and mechatronics.
SaberRD offers full electro-mechanical simulation while modeling an extensive range of component types at various abstraction levels.
SaberRD can deliver accurate data for a variety of EV studies, including the utilization of drive cycles to capture driver and vehicle behavior. Various governments and organizations create drive cycles to evaluate car performance.
City driving, freeway driving, and country driving have quite different driving cycles. Furthermore, human drivers' driving cycles differ from those of partially or fully autonomous cars. The EV developer optimizes the design for the most typical driving profiles of the target users by using the required modifications.
Key Players in the Virtual Prototyping Market
Some of the prominent names that have established their dominance (and a few who are rising rapidly) in the virtual prototyping operation for electric vehicles are:
- dSPACE GmbH
- EOMYS Engineering
- ESI Group
- Siemens
- Waterloo Maple Inc.
- Autodesk Inc.
- Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
- ANSYS Inc.
- PTC Inc.
- Arm Ltd
- Dassault Systèmes SE
- Synopsys
- Altair Engineering, Inc.
- Claytex Services Ltd
Common Challenges for Virtual Prototyping
The high cost of the virtual prototyping process is one of the key barriers to the growth of the electric vehicle virtual prototyping market.
Conclusion
Electric vehicles are becoming more popular, and over the next ten years, they will account for a considerable portion of the automobile market. Electro-mechanical system development for vehicle applications is always difficult, but EVs raise the bar dramatically.
Physical prototypes are too expensive for all engineers who could benefit from them, and it's critical to "shift left" the design and verification process far earlier in the project timeline.
An EV development pipeline using virtual prototypes based on numerous industry-leading Synopsys technologies is a proven and available alternative. Before any hardware is constructed, this cycle allows for the study of design choices, the consideration of trade-offs, the development of embedded software, and many layers of verification.
All project engineers can quickly recreate the virtual prototype for faster and more robust EV development.
For more information, please see the comprehensive new report by BIS Research Electric Vehicle Virtual Prototyping - A Global and Regional Analysis. A free sample of the report is also available.
About the Publisher: BIS Research is a global market intelligence, research and advisory company that focuses on emerging technology trends that are likely to disrupt the market. Its team includes industry veterans, experts, and analysts with diverse backgrounds in consulting, investment banking, government, and academia.
