Electric bikes growth market for microcontrollers

In what it calling a “new business opportunity”, Infineon Technologies is launching an 8-bit microcontroller for electric bicycles (e-bikes). Positioned at the heart of the e-bike control unit, the microcontroller controls the motor operation and ensures the most efficient use of the energy. With one fully-charged battery, an e-bike with a load of up to 100 kg can travel approximately 40 km at an average speed of 25 km per hour.

With a clock rate of 27 MHz and high performance peripherals, dedicated motor control units using the Infineon XC866 family of microcontrollers enable e-bike control board designers to realize functions such as remote unlocking, ebrake, intelligent dashboard.

The market for the electric bicycles accounts for more than 18.5 million bikes for 2007 and shows an annual growth rate of 25 percent. E-bikes are equipped with a battery pack that frees the riders from pedaling. Convenience, environmentalfriendliness, and high performance-cost ratio are factors behind the booming demand from bicyclists around the world.

Increased energy efficiency

“With more than 10 percent market share, Infineon is in the leading position for new electric bicycles,” said Ching Yen Shih, Senior Director, Industrial and Multimarket m i c ro c o n t ro l l e r s at Infineon. “Our microcontrollers increase the energy efficiency of the battery pack and manage all functions of the e-bike control system.” Infineon says that the next-generation of the e-bike control units, available early next year, will be equipped with a new version of the microcontroller with 8 kB of memory, which allows for more “intelligent” operations and will eliminate the use of three Hall sensors used for the motor position feedback, required by the current control algorithm.

In addition to the system cost savings, the sensorless solution will significantly reduce the maintenance efforts for ebike manufacturers, as approximately 80 percent of e-bike malfunctions today are caused by the failure of these sensors.