Microchip Technology (Asia General Manager and Korea Representative Han Byung-don) helps developers easily develop chargers through charger designs that allow for diverse product configurations to be changed to suit regional market environments.

Microchip announced on the 8th that it has released three types of flexible and scalable reference designs for electric vehicle (EV) chargers that can shorten the time to market for EV charger products.

This design consists of a single-phase AC residential charger, a three-phase AC commercial charger equipped with Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) and System-on-Chip (SoC), and a three-phase AC commercial charger equipped with OCPP and a display.

Microchip can provide most of the active components used in EV charger reference designs, such as MCUs, analog front-ends, memory, connectivity, and power conversion, which significantly simplifies the integration process and enables manufacturers to accelerate time-to-market for new EV charging solutions.

Joe Thomsen, Vice President of Microchip’s Digital Signal Controller (DSC) business unit, stated, “Microchip’s E-mobility team is focusing on developing reference designs that customers can use immediately to reap the benefits.”"Microchip helps customers shorten their design cycles by providing not only complete solutions, such as this new EV charger reference design, but also related hardware, software, and technical support," they added.

Microchip's EV charger reference design enables manufacturers to scale into various solutions depending on the target market to meet the requirements of residential and commercial charging applications.

This reference design provides source code based on an already verified software stack that complies with all necessary hardware design files and communication protocols, including OCPP.

OCPP is a standard protocol for communication between a charging point or charging station and a central system.

OCPP was developed to ensure interoperability of charging applications regardless of the network or vendor.

The reference design for a single-phase AC EV charger for home use provides a cost-effective and convenient solution for home chargers utilizing single-phase power. This design features a high-performance onboard energy meter with automatic calibration capabilities, enabling the streamlining of the production process. This reference design also includes integrated safety protection features such as PEN (Protective Earth Neutral) fault detection and Residual Current Device (RCD) detection.

The commercial 3-phase AC EV charger reference design with OCPP and Wi-Fi® SoC is intended for high-end residential and commercial charging stations and features OCPP 1.6 stack integration for communication with the charging network and a Wi-Fi SoC for remote management.

The Three-Phase AC Commercial with OCPP and Display EV Charger Reference Design is designed with an architecture compliant with the UL 2231 standard for stable operation and is intended for public charging stations installed in commercial and public places. Based on bidirectional charging capabilities and a modular architecture, it can support up to 22kW. It supports a robust graphical user interface (GUI) equipped with a Thin-Film Transistor (TFT) screen and touch input functions that can be used even in harsh environments.