• The EV charging industry may seem to be divided between hardware and software specialists, but the two are mutually interdependent, and must work together on various levels.

• BTC Power’s chargers incorporate three main categories of firmware, which enable the hardware to communicate with the vehicle and with the backend software that powers user authentication and payment processing.

• EV charging hardware must be tested for compatibility with vehicles and with backend software systems on an ongoing basis. BTC Power maintains a testing lab and a regular schedule of testing and re-testing.

Ensuring charging hardware and software compatibility: Q&A with BTC Power’s Bill Seamon

EV charging, like most modern technological endeavors, depends on a stack consisting of hardware, software and services, which work together to deliver the desired result. Some companies offer the full stack (e.g. Tesla, or the many companies that offer Charging as a Service), while others specialize in hardware (ABB, Tritium), and others stick to software (AMPECO, Driivz).

We’ve covered heaps of hardware manufacturers and scads of software providers, but when we look a little closer, we find that these are not mutually-exclusive categories. Charging hardware incorporates various kinds of software (firmware, low-level operating systems), and software companies have to test their wares with a wide range of hardware products on an ongoing basis, so sellers of the hard and the soft find themselves working together on various levels.

BTC Power, which describes itself as the second-largest US maker of EV chargers after Tesla, understands this symbiotic relationship as well as anyone. The company has integrated its chargers with more than 50 software systems, and maintains a large testing lab, where, the company says, “all the automakers” test their vehicles for compatibility.

Here at Charged, while we pride ourselves on delving into technical details of EV charging products, one of the reasons we focus on one-on-one interviews is that we love to hear real-world stories about how companies solve problems for their customers. When we approached BTC Power for an article about the company’s testing procedures, the PR people hooked us up with Senior Program Manager Bill Seamon because “he has the best customer stories.”

Charged: So you’re the man with the juicy stories from down in the trenches of charging?

Bill Seamon: Yeah. I was the “test and release” manager. Now I’m a program manager and I’m overseeing a backend migration project right now.

Charged: Backend migration? So, for example, if a charge point operator loses their backend software because the software provider pulls out of the market, you come to the rescue?

Bill Seamon: We’re also getting customers just changing backends from one company to another. Maybe they’re not getting support, I don’t know. But we’re getting a lot of that also.

Charged: I imagine most of your customers are either CPOs or fleet operators. Are there some other categories?

Bill Seamon: We have the whole range, from customers buying hundreds of chargers to customers buying ones and twos. We have the major charge providers; we have the CPOs that sell third-party to customers and help them install it; and then we have individual customers buying two, three, five chargers to put out in front of their convenience stores. We also have utility companies, school districts and hospitality companies who are our direct customers.

Charged: Those customers must have very different needs—I imagine a CPO or a big fleet operator is likely to be quite knowledgeable about charging, whereas a small customer probably has a lot of questions.

Bill Seamon: Yeah, some of them will buy the chargers from us, but then they’ll work with a backend provider that’ll help them install and run through the permit process. But It’s a whole new industry. I think everybody’s still trying to figure out the best way to do it.

Charged: There are a lot of charger companies out there and, well, chargers all do the same thing. How do you differentiate your products from your competitors?

Bill Seamon: Ours are a little more expensive, but we put a lot inside. I think safety is the biggest thing we bring to the table. These things are putting a lot of power through that cable, and heaven forbid somebody gets hurt charging their car. We have thermistors in the cable, in the head, and internal to the charger, and we’re monitoring those thermistors. There’s a big difference from charging a car in Arizona in August to charging a car in Minnesota in December. There’s a lot of internal software checks that are being done all the time while we’re charging the vehicle.

Another advantage we offer is stability. We are probably one of the few charger manufacturers that are profitable. We’re making money. Not a lot, but this is a new industry and it’s going to take several years for everything to shake out. But chances are we’re one of the few that are going to be around in 5, 10 years.

Charged: Everyone tells me there’s a shakeout going on, and it’s not over yet.

Bill Seamon: I spent 24 years at Western Digital in the disk drive market. Back then there were hundreds of disk drive manufacturers, and now there’s really two. The same type of thing will probably happen in the EV market. Same with the backend providers, the network providers.

Charged: You have integrated your chargers with more than 50 software systems. How do you test your hardware with all these different software products?

Bill Seamon: We do integration with the backend software to make sure our charger processes billing and credit cards. We have weekly meetings with the larger backend providers. We have a major backend provider coming this week for several days of testing on site.

We have contacts with makers of all the different credit card devices. We’ve had problems in the past where the device manufacturer will update the software without telling us, and the library that our software uses to talk to the credit card becomes incompatible with the new version. We have the capability to talk to our chargers over the air all over the world—we can update the software, do diagnostics, download logs for debugging. There’s some pretty sophisticated things going on inside that charger to make sure we can support it.

We also test with the car manufacturers. Here’s a story about one of the major European vehicle manufacturers. On the CCS2 connector there’s a button you press to release the connector. The vehicle senses that button press, it turns off and tells the charger to shut things down, then the vehicle releases the connector so we can pull it out.

And this major manufacturer never knew what that button was. When they sensed that button press, they did an emergency shutdown, which caused arcing in our internal power supply, because you can’t just shut down 300 kilowatts going through a connector. We’re like, “Guys, you’re killing us here. You can’t do that.” And they said, “We’ve never seen that button before. We didn’t know what to do.” The spec is pretty cryptic. My only thought was: Engineers that can’t design, write specs.

Charged: We’re talking about the Open Charge Point Protocol?

Bill Seamon: Yeah, and the connector spec and the Level 2 spec—it’s all tied together.

Charged: When a backend provider says they’re charger-agnostic, is that just as simple as being OCPP-compliant?

Bill Seamon: There are different implementations and different levels of OCPP. We meet most of those. But again, it’s the vehicle manufacturer interpreting the spec. We work with these backend providers, run some basic charging tests. I’ve got 15 different backend providers that we’re working with. The backend provider may say, “We need OCPP 1.6.” But there’s a lot of vendor-specific or customer-specific commands that can be implemented. The spec is the core, but there’s a lot of other stuff that gets put into that.

Charged: Your charger is not just a dumb piece of hardware that works with somebody else’s software. You’ve got your own software layers that have to interface with backend providers and all kinds of other software. How does all that fit together?

Bill Seamon: We basically have three major pieces of software. There’s a board in the dispenser that talks to the car and that does the CCS protocol. And we have several people working on that because it’s always changing. A new vehicle will come out, we’ll test with that vehicle. We find stuff. They find stuff.

Second, we have internal firmware that’s in the dispenser and in the tower. For our standalone charger, we have one set. But for installations that have dispensers, there’s a DC cable and CAN lines going from the dispensers to the tower. So, there’s firmware in the tower and firmware in the dispenser talking back and forth for sending power and shutting power off.

Third, there’s what we call the point-of-sale firmware. This is a Java application in the dispenser that provides the GUI interface to the customer, processes credit card transactions, and then talks to the backend provider to send all that information back and forth. Each credit card device works differently, and there are multiple credit card devices that customers want.

Another story—I got a call from a customer that had installed some of our old 50-kilowatt chargers, and they had to wait over a year before the power company gave them power to turn them on. When they turned them on, they found that they had these obsolete card readers that the backend provider couldn’t support. So, we were scrambling to try and see if our point-of-sale application could support that customer, because the backend provider couldn’t.

That brings up another point—dealing with these different backend providers, with the vehicle manufacturers, with the credit card companies, gives us wide knowledge of how to help these customers, which may be the owner of the charger or the person trying to charge his vehicle when he’s in the middle of nowhere. We have a team that works pretty much around the clock that’s tied into our customer support phone number.

If a software provider pulls out, and all these people are panicking and scrambling, they can turn to BTC Power and we’ll know how to help you as quickly as possible.

Charged: It sounds like there’s a certain amount of overlap between the frontend and the backend software. In your example of the credit card reader, the backend couldn’t support the credit card reader, but you found a way to support it.

Bill Seamon: Yeah, there’s different systems for credit card readers. In some cases, we talk to the credit card reader and to their payment network. There’s other companies where we don’t even talk to the credit card reader—it has a separate ethernet port, and when you swipe the card, that reader talks to their server and it knows that that reader is registered to a specific backend and customer. That customer’s backend does the payment, the backend server tells us it’s okay, and we start charging. That’s called an around-the-loop transaction. In other cases, we talk to the credit card reader directly, and in some cases, it’s in between. There’s a lot of different protocols involved.

Charged: So, in some cases, a particular function might be handled by your software, and in other cases it might be handled by the backend?

Bill Seamon: Yeah, it’s all specific based on the backend, the credit card reader and the charger, so there’s all that software going on inside our charger to make sure everything is communicating properly.

Charged: When you’re testing your hardware with different software and different vehicles, is there a standardized testing regimen, or some sort of a scorecard?

Bill Seamon: Well, there’s all different kinds of testing. Right now we’re working with OCA, which is a company that got a certification for OCPP 2.0, 1.6 and all that. They have a lab in Virginia and we have our chargers set up there permanently. We work with them to get OCPP 2.0 certification—they run the test, they send the report to OCA, OCA reviews the report and gives us our certification stickers. We run through that periodically. Different backend providers have their own test processes that we follow.

Charged: I hear a lot about microgrids. A large installation includes not only the charging hardware, but switchgear, transformers and possibly battery storage and/or onsite generation. Tell me a bit about how all that stuff fits together.

Bill Seamon: When our charger talks to the backend provider’s server, it also talks to our own monitoring server. For each customer, we have a monitoring server with its own internal protocol. When there’s a problem, we can react quicker than waiting for the customer to complain because we have a server talking to all our chargers. For that customer, we know what site they’re at, we know the charger serial number…all that information.

Also, we’re working with several large manufacturers to provide energy management. Say we’ve got 10 chargers at a site. They all have, let’s say, 350 kW capability, but we don’t have that much power at the site. If everybody plugs in at the same time, we’ll be reducing the power to all the vehicles so they can all use their chargers and manage that energy at that site based on their power company’s capabilities.

Charged: A subject I’ve been hearing a good bit about in connection with microgrids is cloud control versus local control. Amber Putignano at ABB told me that she sees a trend for more of the control functions to be handled on site, as opposed to everything going to the cloud and back. But Oren Halevi at Driivz, a software provider, pointed out that certain things, like authentication and payment processing, have to happen in the cloud.

Bill Seamon: Yeah, the problem is the chargers don’t talk to each other. They talk to our monitoring portal or to the backend provider, which is the cloud, so if you were to have something local, you would need a third connection for that charger to talk to a local server. I don’t see that happening right away because it would be redundant and extra cost. And today, your credit card transactions are all cloud-based. Our charger will record transactions, and we can keep local account information on it, so if we do lose the internet for a short period of time, then once the internet comes back, we would send all that information. But the payment is really dependent on the cloud anyhow, so you just have to have a reliable internet connection.

Charged: It must be a challenge to make sure new software works with older hardware that may still be in service. And as software and standards change, I guess you have to re-test with customers periodically.

Bill Seamon: In the lab, we have all our chargers on skids, with pigtails coming off of them. If somebody wants to test on an older model, we lift-truck them in, plug them in and begin testing with them within an hour.

For each customer we’ve tested with, we’ll re-test anywhere from every three weeks to every six months. We have a matrix of each version of code that we last tested with each vendor or backend provider. There may be new code coming along, but we don’t change that provider’s code until we test with them and get approval.

We have a software release notice process that we keep internally. We document the whole process so we can keep track of what we released for whom. We record the versions we last tested with Customer X on this device, this charger model, etc. Here’s the new versions, here’s the changes, here’s where they gave us authorization to do a pilot, to do the full rollout.

We have this firmware matrix that has all our customers, all the models. Right now it’s a big shared Excel spreadsheet, and we’ve probably got 400 lines of code in that spreadsheet to keep track of all these different customers. Once this industry consolidates, it’ll make my job a lot easier, to go from 400 to maybe 10.

Commercial EV OEM Harbinger is on a roll. Just in the last few months, the company has launched a new line of battery storage products, acquired autonomous driving company Phantom AI, and unveiled a new medium-duty truck. CEO John Harris told Charged that his five-year-old company’s success is based on specialization and vertical integration (read our January in-depth interview with Harris).

For its next act, Harbinger has partnered with mobile healthcare solution provider Frazer to electrify ambulances and mobile healthcare vehicles using Harbinger’s plug-in hybrid vehicle chassis and battery technology.

Texas-based Frazer designs and builds emergency response and mobile healthcare vehicles for EMS agencies, fire departments, hospitals and specialty care programs. As part of the new partnership, the company has made a strategic investment in Harbinger.

“At Frazer, we believe the future of healthcare should deliver exceptional medical care directly to the patient, rather than simply transport the patient to care,” said CEO Laura Griffin. “This partnership with Harbinger demonstrates Frazer’s move beyond the traditional ambulance model and into a mobile healthcare solution provider that supports new care delivery models. Hybrid-electric vehicles offer a practical first step toward electrification in emergency and medical environments, while preserving full operational readiness and clinical reliability.”

Frazer and Harbinger plan to build several new mobile healthcare products:

• an emergency medical response vehicle built on Harbinger’s hybrid chassis to support mission-critical reliability, clinical grade power redundancy, and drastically reduced operational complexity;
• a mobile healthcare platform built on Harbinger’s hybrid chassis to support care delivery outside traditional fixed location facilities such as community care facilities and hospital system extensions;
• auxiliary power systems based on Harbinger’s battery technology, providing redundant power for field medical care in both hybrid and ICE vehicles.

Harbinger’s hybrid offering pairs its electric chassis with a gas-powered range extender that recharges the battery when needed. This architecture enables reduced emissions during idling, stable and redundant power delivery for onboard medical equipment, and simplified energy management.

Both Harbinger and Frazer are committed to US manufacturing. Harbinger designs and manufactures its electric and hybrid chassis in-house at its California headquarters, including all major vehicle systems such as the powertrain, battery system, steering, brakes and more. Frazer produces its products in Houston.

“Through this partnership, Harbinger is entering the mobile healthcare and emergency medical response market for the first time,” said John Harris. “Our proprietary platform was designed from the ground up as a modular foundation to support a wide range of commercial and specialty applications. In mobile healthcare, redundancy, uptime and operational flexibility are non-negotiable, and our platform is built to deliver the reliability this market requires.”

Source: Harbinger

Power Innovations International (Pii) is a global provider of power management systems and services. Founded in the US in 1997, Pii became a subsidiary of LITEON in 2014. The company’s EVDC line of DC fast chargers can accept a wide range of input voltages—a feature that addresses a major bottleneck for DC charger installations. (Read an in-depth interview with Nick Stone, Pii’s Product and Market Manager, from our January-March 2025 issue.)

Now Pii has announced that its EVDC lineup is officially cETLus listed, meaning that the chargers have been certified to meet North American electrical and safety standards set by Underwriters Laboratories (UL) and the Canadian Standards Association (CSA).

The EVDC line was evaluated for safety by Intertek, ensuring that the products conform with UL standards 2202, 2231-1 and 2231-2; and CSA standards C22.2 No. 281.1, 281.2 and 346.

Pii’s EVDC chargers are designed to provide ease of installation and maximum power input flexibility. The EVDC line features a direct DC voltage input, making the units suitable for DC-coupled microgrids and DC power distribution systems.

“The EVDC line represents a major step forward in how we approach site-specific charging needs,” said Nick Stone, Pii’s Director of Product. “With a DC voltage input added to our listing, we’re making it easier than ever for our customers to deploy reliable [DC fast charging] infrastructure in an expanded set of applications without the typical installation hurdles.”

“Achieving this listing for our EVDC line reinforces our mission to provide the most flexible charging solutions on the market,” said Pii President Gary Straker. “By meeting these rigorous North American safety standards, we are giving our customers the confidence that they are investing in a product that doesn’t compromise on safety or performance.”

Source: Power Innovations International

PPST Solutions says it has been named a value-added reseller for EA Elektro-Automatik, expanding its test portfolio to cover both AC and DC power validation for electrification markets.

Engineers increasingly need test coverage across the whole power-conversion chain, not just isolated AC or DC boxes. With the new arrangement, PPST now combines Pacific Power Source AC systems—sources, grid simulators and loads—with EA’s bidirectional DC power supplies, regenerative DC loads, and battery test systems. The company says that combination can reduce integration complexity and support more complete validation workflows for applications including EVs, energy storage, V2G, renewable energy, aerospace, defense, and AI-oriented power infrastructure.

PPST describes the offering as a one-stop AC/DC test platform backed by systems integration, application engineering, and lifecycle support. It also says the platforms are designed to be open and configurable, with built-in safety features and flexible software integration for engineered test environments.

“As power electronics solutions grow in scale and complexity, engineers face new challenges optimizing designs for rapidly evolving industries,” said James Hitchcock, VP and GM of EA Elektro-Automatik at Tektronix. PPST VP Peter O’Brien said the broader lineup is meant to deliver “comprehensive AC and DC test solutions” with strong out-of-the-box value.

Source: PPST Solutions

Coperion K-Tron has introduced the RF400 Roller Feeder for battery manufacturing, a feeding system aimed at improving consistency in dry-electrode processing at laboratory and pilot scale.

The company says the RF400 is designed to provide uniform deposition of electrode dry blends while reducing waste and production variability. The system uses a grooved feed roller paired with a smooth scraper roller to feed material gently and consistently, helping prevent bridging at the outlet and improving distribution across the calender roller below.

The feeder supports a coating width adjustable up to 400 mm, making it suitable for lab and pilot-scale battery production setups. The company also says the unit integrates with its existing KCM-III controls and Smart Force Transducer weighing technology to enable real-time monitoring, precise feed-rate control and adjustments for changing material characteristics.

Dry-electrode manufacturing is getting a lot of attention because it promises lower energy use and less solvent handling than conventional wet coating—but it also makes material handling and uniform deposition trickier. “The RF400 will set a new standard in the industry,” said Jay Daniel, Head of R&D Feeders and Feeding Systems at Coperion K-Tron.

Source: Coperion

hofer Vienna and Pankl Turbosystems are jointly developing fully integrated electrified turbo systems for hybrid and high-performance powertrains, combining the turbomachine, electric machine, power electronics and control strategy into a single engineered system.

The companies say the idea is to avoid treating the e-turbo or e-compressor as an add-on subsystem. Instead, the high-speed electric machine—built with Form Litz winding technology—the power electronics, software controls and turbo machinery are being developed together from the start, with hofer handling the electric machine, electronics and software integration, and Pankl leading turbomachinery design, aerodynamics, materials, and high-speed mechanical integration.

According to the announcement, the integrated approach is intended to improve boost response, raise overall system efficiency and fit more cleanly into hybrid and high-performance architectures. The companies also say it can reduce cooling and packaging demands while improving volumetric and gravimetric power density, EMC and NVH performance, and long-term reliability.

Both companies stress that the development is being carried out to established industrial validation and quality standards, with an eye toward regulated and safety-critical markets. That makes sense: once you’re spinning an electric machine and turbo hardware at very high speed in a tightly packaged system, “integration” stops being a marketing word and starts becoming the whole engineering problem.

Source: hofer

Scalvy says a joint concept evaluation with Valeo has validated its modular battery-integrated power architecture for EVs under WLTC operating conditions, marking a step toward automotive deployment of the company’s distributed “Power Neuron” platform.

Instead of using separate centralized inverters, DC-DC converters and onboard chargers, Scalvy’s architecture distributes those functions into compact modules at the edge of each battery pack. The company says that reduces switching and conduction losses while making the system scalable across vehicle classes and battery chemistries.

In the lab-based WLTC evaluation, Scalvy says the system achieved a peak inverter efficiency of 98.3% at 10,000 rpm and 65 Nm. The company also says module-level state-of-charge balancing kept SOC deviation between battery modules negligible during testing, and that the system maintained motor temperatures below 62 °C and power-device temperatures below 65 °C without hotspot formation.

That combination of tight SOC balancing and pulse-like distributed switching reduces localized electrical and thermal stress, enabling faster charging and extending battery life by up to 15%, according to Scalvy. Valeo’s Farouk Boudjemai said the results were “highly encouraging” and would help advance the concept’s readiness level. Scalvy says it is field-testing the technology with select customers and is targeting commercial production in 2027.

Source: Scalvy

In electric motor engineering, copper is king. The more copper you can pack into the stator, the lower the electrical resistance, and the more current, torque and power the machine can deliver. Traditional motors rely on bundles of round wires, but those circular cross-sections leave large pockets of unused space.

“If you would take such a motor and cut through and count the surface of the copper compared to the area where the wires are, you will get something of the order of 40% of the volume is copper,” Dr. Florian Kassel, co-founder of Germany-based electric motor developer SciMo, told Charged in an interview. “This is very cheap to manufacture, but only allows very small currents, and results in poor performance.”

The copper density in the stator is a key property of an electric motor determining the performance for a given motor size. An increased copper density leads to reduced stator diameter, less motor weight and a reduced rotor diameter, enabling increased rotational speeds. Adding material makes the rotor heavier, which slows down the rotor. “If you go to a higher diameter to put in the copper that you need, you’re also missing all the possibilities to spin the rotor to high speeds, which in turn reduces your maximum power output,” Kassel said.

One solution is the auto industry’s hairpin technology: thick copper bars, roughly 2.5-3 mm across, bent like oversized staples and inserted into the stator slots. On the far side, every protruding end must be precisely aligned and welded to form closed loops.

This technique delivers high copper density, but only works economically at large scale because it demands complex, highly specialized machinery. And it has drawbacks at high rotational speeds, as larger conductors suffer significant high-frequency losses, which can sap efficiency during sustained, high-power driving.

“If you buy, for example, a Porsche Taycan, you can reach high efficiencies at typical inner-city speeds. But if you go on the highway and just floor it, you will have very high losses. And you will lose a lot of energy, resulting in a significantly reduced range.”

To overcome these limitations, Germany-based SciMo uses a different approach. The company has developed a novel motor winding architecture that maximizes copper utilization without increasing size or weight. The technology keeps the rectangular shape, but uses thin, fragile and flat wires, roughly 1×4 mm, to fill the slots in the motors. This allows for a smaller motor that contains the same amount of copper, increasing the density and supporting higher speeds.

“We’re reaching something in the order of 70% copper filling factor. So we can double the copper density in the motor, and therefore we can put much more current through the system and have much higher power densities,” Kassel said.

The smaller cross-section avoids the high-frequency losses that plague hairpins. The method pairs high copper density with better efficiency at top-end RPMs. “We don’t have these negative effects, so we’re somewhere in between these two worlds and have a really nice tradeoff,” Kassel added.

This winding technique brings an unexpected second advantage: thermal performance. Because each conductor is individually and precisely positioned geometrically, every wire lies only about 1.5 mm from the water-cooled motor housing, creating a highly efficient cooling effect.

In traditional round-wire bundles, hundreds of strands may sit buried in the middle of a coil, far from any cooling path. Hairpin motors, meanwhile, must contend with chunky weld points that can only efficiently be cooled by oil. The precisely arranged flat wires in SciMo’s motors create a clean thermal path, letting engineers push more current without overheating.

The result is an unusually high power-to-weight ratio—in the order of 20 kW/kg, several times that of typical production motors. In motorsport applications, the company builds lightweight units of 20–30 kg that are capable of peak outputs comparable to 2,000 horsepower when used in multi-motor setups.

Slashing winding costs through full automation

SciMo was founded in 2017 by three PhD students working with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and supported the students on the university’s formula racing team with electric motors. Every year, about 60 students develop, build and drive a vehicle in the Formula Student Electric international competitions.

“During that time, we realized that these motors were exceptionally good; they had significantly higher power density compared to all the competitors,” Kassel said. “In the following years this team won the World Title of the series and made first places several times—at that point we knew: this technology is really something.”

The SciMo team has grown to 25 people working on the technology full-time, building the business by working with customers directly without backing from outside investors to fund its development.

But producing such stators hasn’t been simple. In the early years, each unit required weeks of painstaking manual work. “We started in the beginning doing it by hand. It was highly expensive. It took three weeks for just one stator.”

Production was limited to small batches, often just three to 30 motors per customer, depending on the project. That limited the business to niche applications willing to absorb high labor costs, such as motorsport or early-stage aerospace customers.

The company’s turning point arrived in 2022, when it secured roughly €2 million in support from the EU’s Horizon 2020 accelerator program to automate the production process.

Semi-automation followed. Machines supported the technicians in winding the stators, which reduced the production time to one week.

Now the company has achieved fully automated production—an essential step toward scaling the technology beyond today’s niche markets.

“Since founding SciMo, we have always had this target of having fully automated manufacturing of this winding technology,” Kassel said. “This winding takes up 30-35% of the total manufacturing costs of the motor, and now we can drop that to half. And the more volume we produce, the better the margin gets.”

Because the cost per unit improves with volume, the company can now consider markets that were previously out of reach.

Scaling motor innovation with robotic precision

The new winding line relies on robotic systems guided by a sophisticated software stack, rather than the conventional CNC-style machines that dominate the motor industry. These robots execute fine, force-controlled movements to place each fragile rectangular wire into the stator slots with more accuracy than skilled human technicians. “There’s no reduction in precision or performance,” Kassel noted. “With automation, it actually gets better.”

But precision comes at a cost: time. Unlike the automotive industry’s hairpin-wound motors, which can be produced in around 60 seconds per stator, even with full optimization, a single SciMo stator is expected to take roughly six hours to wind. That makes it challenging to scale the technology for mass-market production.

“It’s still very time-consuming to produce motors with our winding technology,” Kassel said. “We will never be a competitor to hairpin technology or anything like that.”

Instead, the robotics-based process offers something equally valuable for certain sectors: flexibility. Because the system relies on software-defined motion paths for precision rather than fixed tooling, engineers can reconfigure the winding setup quickly to accommodate different stator geometries or custom layouts. Producing five units for a research program, 50 for a specialty vehicle maker, or 500 for an electric bus fleet all fall within the company’s sweet spot.

The approach has practical limits. Scaling to 10,000 units a year would require upwards of 20 to 25 winding machines—an investment that would make other technologies more cost-effective. But in the niche markets where high performance matters more than ultra-low manufacturing cost, the company’s robotic system gives it an edge. It can deliver custom, high-performance motors without the rigid tooling and requalification burdens that constrain hairpin or other conventional winding manufacturing technologies.

“Now that we have the fully automated winding technology ready we can look at other markets with increased economic pressure,” Kassel said. ”There’s no drawback, there’s no reduction in precision or in performance…if we scale up now.”

Powering motor sports, aviation and the next frontier

Automation enables SciMo to dominate the high-performance, low-volume applications in which precision, adaptability and unconventional engineering pay off.

That includes the high-end automotive sector, where manufacturers of high-performance car brands are willing to pay a premium for increased power density.

“In the motorsport business, where we have batch sizes of 100 to 200 motors per year, we’re a big competitor,” Kassel said, “because you can either have a cheap, non-custom, mass-produced motor or you go to manually produced custom motors that rely heavily on expensive materials and come with astronomical prices. SciMo is exactly in between these two worlds.”

One of the most promising applications is electric aviation, where weight is crucial. One of SciMo’s first customers was a company developing electric people-carrying drones. “You want to have as little weight as possible, and therefore we could sell these motors at high prices.” The sector’s needs align perfectly with the company’s lightweight, high-output motors.

“We are in many different industries at the moment. The main customers come from the motor sports and aviation industries, but we also provide electric motors for rocket engines or as dyno motors in test bench applications,” Kassel said.

Setting the stage for the next leap in electric motor engineering

If SciMo succeeds in scaling, the economic implications could be as transformative as the performance gains. Conventional motors derive around 70% of their cost from materials, especially copper and steel.

By packing copper more efficiently, engineers can shrink the entire motor, reducing overall material use by roughly 30% while enabling smaller, faster rotors that further boost power and efficiency. And because SciMo winding architecture inherently runs cooler, it opens the door to future upgrades.

“Now if we would say, we need an even higher performance output, we could do this either with advanced magnetic materials for much higher temperature tolerance, or with ultra-thin premium electrical steel to cut stator losses even further,” Kassel said.

Electric motors are fundamentally constrained by heat, because as the temperature rises, the magnets weaken and can be permanently destroyed. But motors built with premium, heat-resistant materials can tolerate much higher operating temperatures.

“For us, there’s still lots of room for improvement; but at the moment, we don’t need it. We are just happy that we have now managed to get this winding technology fully automated and can pass on these savings to our customers,” Kassel said.

“We’re now at a really interesting point in time for the company where we’ll now try to scale up and find new markets, and we’ll see how it goes. But this is the point we’re standing at. So, exciting times ahead.”

HeyCharge has launched HeyCharge Connect, a new product line of retrofit adapters for existing EV chargers, and the first product—the MagicBox—is aimed at turning ordinary OCPP-compatible home wallboxes into smarter, offline-capable charging systems.

The Munich company says the MagicBox plugs into any OCPP-compatible charger and connects it to HeyCharge’s SecureCharge platform without an electrician visit, firmware changes, or downtime. Unlike cloud-dependent chargers that can struggle in garages with poor connectivity, the MagicBox can manage charging sessions, enforce energy limits and communicate with other devices over a local mesh network even when internet access is unavailable.

Once installed, HeyCharge says the adapter enables solar and dynamic-tariff optimization, dynamic load management, smart-home integration and company-car reimbursement features. The company says it already supports Home Assistant, with Matter support planned for the second half of 2026, and can connect with rooftop PV systems and time-varying electricity tariffs to schedule charging around self-consumption and power cost. It also supports Germany’s §14a EnWG requirements for grid operator control of large electrical loads.

HeyCharge is also adding in-vehicle access through Android Automotive OS, which it says will let drivers start and manage charging sessions from the vehicle infotainment system—useful in fleet and pool-car settings where RFID cards and phone apps become operational clutter. The MagicBox will launch first with Easee across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with availability expected in Q2-Q3 2026.

Source: HeyCharge

Diodes Incorporated has expanded its automotive-compliant PowerDI8080-5 MOSFET lineup with a new 100 V N-channel device that the company says offers industry-leading on-resistance for 48 V automotive designs.

The new DMTH10H1M7SPGWQ features a maximum RDS(on) of 1.5 mΩ and is aimed at 48 V BLDC motor drives in applications such as electric power steering and braking systems, along with battery disconnect switches and onboard chargers. Diodes also introduced additional 40 V, 60 V, and 80 V devices in the same 8 mm x 8 mm gullwing-leaded package, including a 40 V part with 0.4 mΩ maximum RDS(on), which the company says is among the lowest in the industry.

The package itself is a big part of the pitch. Diodes says the PowerDI8080-5 footprint is 64 mm²—about 40% of the board area of a TO-263 (D2PAK)—with a low 1.7 mm profile for space-constrained applications. The company also says copper-clip die bonding cuts junction-to-case thermal resistance to as low as 0.3 °C/W, allowing drain currents up to 847 A, while the gullwing leads support automated optical inspection and improved temperature-cycling reliability.

The broader lineup includes the 80 V DMTH81M2SPGWQ, the 60 V DMTH6M70SPGWQ for 24 V applications, and 40 V parts for 12 V motor drives, DC-DC conversion, and microcontroller-driven automotive loads. Diodes says the devices are AEC-qualified and built in IATF 16949-certified facilities.

Source: Diodes Incorporated