Inside ADI’s Catalyst Centre ...

Jul 21, 2023

The building hosts a number of co-development environments, ranging from wireless battery management systems through smart automation for factories to 5G and 6G system development.

"Catalyst is about the way we will work in the future," said Leo McHugh, vice president of industrial automation at ADI. "We have representation from every business in ADI, and the Catalyst is about accelerating the adoption of new technologies and working with ecosystem partners."

The $100m centre was opened last year, delayed by a year as a result of the pandemic. The aim is to accelerate the development of designs from its largest customers using some of ADI's 75,000 products. It comes as the company consolidates the acquisitions of Linear Technologies in power and Maxim Integrated for controllers.

This sounds like a way of sidestepping the distributors for the largest accounts, as this is the kind of activity handled by skilled field application engineers with customers. Not so, says Mike Morrissey, senior director and director of the centre. It is more about moving more directly to support end customers with modules and reference designs.

"The world doesn't have enough analog engineers to keep pace so customers are coming to us asking us to help them get up the design ladder," said McHugh.

Part of the issue is that ADI does not want to go down the system on chip integration route he says, but instead wants to combine a wide range of parts to bring a design together.

For example the automated mobile robot (AMR) at the centre has 60% ADI products, from power management and motion control to the inertial measurement unit, time of flight (ToF) sensor and local AI running on the MAX78000 microcontroller as well as 60GHz wireless connectivity. The ToF vision sensor will be released as a module in its own right.

"It's about resilience," says McHugh. "We are now looking at the resilience of the supply chain and how to bring things more internally. Customers want products for 30 years and we often have to bring products back form foundries in house to support that," he said. "A lot of customers are looking at their supply chains.

This ‘green shoring’ or localised production, is what has driven the announcement of a new $600m fab at the site. "Because Europe is very much automotive and communications so ADI Europe is very much focussed on those areas," said Morrissey.

Other examples of key areas are the battery management system (BMS) where ADI has designs in 16 of the top 20 electric vehicle OEMs, (although only two are public) and radio networks, where ADI is in 60% of the 5G network transceiver technology, he says.

EMI testing of a wireless BMS battery pack

To help BMS development, the centre bought a battery pack from a Jaguar Land Rover iPace on the open market and uses this as a demonstration and development system for its seventh generation BMS chips.

The battery monitoring sensors and algorithms, as well as emulation of the battery modules, is used from the very start of the assembly of the battery pack through the lifetime of the vehicle and into the second life of the cells as they are used in other applications such as stationary storage.

"Our electronics are the first to see the battery in production," said Vincent Troy, senior director of product marketing ADI. As well as testing the system for EMI, ADI is adding local AI processing in the BMS to provide insights into the performance of the battery pack.

"We have created digital twins of the systems with 3D models and RF heat maps in the digital twin where we carry our thousands of tests and calibrate with real world data," he added.

Using a wireless BMS also boosts the use of automation in the assembly of the pack, reducing the typical assembly time to 6 minutes from 21 minutes. "For our lead customers this was a key issue with the wireless BMS. It's just a software reconfiguration rather than redesigning the wiring harness," he said.

Catalyst also hosts the Johnson and Johnson Advanced Robotics Centre, working on robotic and manufacturing equipment for the global consumer products company.

This uses robot technology from suppliers such as Rockwell Automation, Sick and Universal Robotics as well as Phoenix Contacts as well as ADI parts to build a flexible robotic production line with cells that are connected wirelessly so they can be easily reconfigured. This is also working on AI for preventive maintenance with vibration data to warn of problems before they bring down a line.

Putting such systems into the factory without disrupting production is challenging so the Catalyst also hosts a sample production line where the technology can be fully tested with the right software before transferring to a factory.

"We are testing customer reference designs and our chip designs," said Peadar Forbes, Director, Radio Platform Development. "It's about simplifying the development with the board, software and testing in a network."

The site is specially licensed to operate in the 3.7Ghz band "That is really popular particularly in private networks in Germany so that's the range we have the license for," he said.

The radio test system at ADI Catalyst

ADI launched a fully integrated open radio unit (O-RU) reference design platform earlier this year. This is a complete system from the optical fronthaul to RF and allows for hardware and software customisation for macro and small cell radio units (RUs).

The platform includes support for all sub 6GHz band and power variants, including multi-band applications. With the timeline for O-RUs becoming more stringent, and operator requirements more demanding and complex, RU developer resources are stretched thin.

The ADRV904x-RD O-RU reference design, includes ADI's fifth generation 8T8R RadioVerse SoC with digital pre-distortion (DPD) in the front end and commercial O-RAN 7.2a IP stack hosted on Intel's Agilex 7 F-series FPGA, delivering superior performance/watt. The platform has been tested with Radisys Layer 2/3 software running on Intel FlexRan server hardware for 8T8R macro deployment scenarios.

"We are very close to eliminating the FPGA later this year," said Forbes.

www.analog.com/en/about-adi/incubators/catalyst.html