Formula Electric Belgium – own electronic control unit with Eurocircuits’ PCBs

This year, our team designed our own electronic control unit.

The tasks of the ECU consist of:

• gathering the sensor data
• interpreting the data
• computing complex algorithms like torque vectoring
• controlling the peripherals with the most important one being the drives of the motor.

With high reliability and low weight demands, we started designing our board and we soon found out we had to tackle some major obstacles.

The first one was reliability. To have a reliable board it is critical that all components are placed closely to each other. Longer lines would mean more noise and more risk of failures. For some components the separation distance is een less than one millimetre.

Besides component placement, we also used some components with a very small pitch, like the gyroscope and the accelerometer. These components have a width and length of only 2mm while having 16 pins connections. Thus PCB traces were very close to each other setting high requirements for the production process.

Thanks to the high precision of the Eurocircuits production process we could translate our requirements into a working prototype, saving on size without giving in on quality. After extensive testing, no shorts were found between these critical traces, not even for the small pitch components like the gyroscope.

Thanks to Eurocircuits, we can present our first prototype (picture), the results of three months of hard work.