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As Europe’s second largest semiconductor producer, ADI has considerable R&D experience. It officially opened the €100m (~$108m/£85.3m) Catalyst R&D facility in Limerick, Ireland, in March 2022. After 18 months of settling in, fitting out and customer collaborations, Electronics Weekly visited to see the living labs in the Catalyst hub.
The 100k sq ft (approximately 930m2) facility has helped customers get designs and products to market faster than without collaboration. Leo Mchugh, vice-president of Industrial Automation at ADI, explained: “Catalyst is a collaboration hub for our customers and our customers’ customer, looking to get to market faster, generate revenue more efficiently, and strengthen and evolve their ecosystem. What it does is create an R&D environment where it’s more accessible to exchange ideas, create living labs, and develop breakthrough solutions.
“It speeds up innovation, so [with] what would have taken 20 different customer visits over two years, we now have our engineers working on the problem together. And instead of taking two years, they’re learning in real time. So, we’re seeing two months to mature a particular robotics solution or to mature a specific sensing application for industrial usage.”
Collaborative approach
This Catalyst approach is based on the principle that collaboration is better than what each customer (or customer’s customer) can do individually. “In principle, it is like a village: only as a community can you achieve big goals,” says Mchugh. “We initially thought we had to convince our partners of the concept. Now, look around: it’s working naturally, and companies are keen to collaborate.”
Initially, one-third of the site was used and later this year the final two-thirds of the facility are expected to be fitted out with labs dedicated to automotive, battery management, industrial and communications R&D.
Among the collaboration efforts there is research into battery management systems for electric vehicles (EVs), RF development for Open RAN in collaboration with Vodafone and Intel, and a joint project with Marvell Semiconductor to reduce Massive MIMO power and weight.
“When we blend Catalyst with our customer-centric manufacturing organisation, we… help our customers solve their most challenging technology problem… this co-creation approach really works,” says Mchugh.
Robotics
A partnership example is pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, which has a site nearby. It uses Catalyst to work on a proof-of-concept testing ground to build testbeds and prototypes for new automation and industrial asset health systems for flexible manufacturing, and manufacturing safety.
“One specific example is … leveraging our 3D time of flight technology in its robots to enable them to operate closer to workers on the factory floor (within 1m) without sacrificing safety measures,” says Mchugh.
The quest for automation means that autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) are continuously being updated and refined. ADAM is the Catalyst project’s automated demonstration module. The accelerator site has built safety algorithms up to the application layer in order for an AGV to know its surroundings. It uses customer’s modules as well as robot operating systems. (ADI stresses that the role of Catalyst is to develop the chips for customers’ AGVs but not to build the vehicles.)
VR/XR progress
Finnish VR/MR headset manufacturer Varjo approached Catalyst to source components for its latest VR/XR headset. “It was difficult to find a core partner who could help in development and afterwards,” said Mika Lundgren, hardware architect at Varjo.
Experiments on the headset design were conducted at Catalyst while development took place in Finland. Part of the experimentation included the integration of a third-party microphone. “It was a collaborative effort to find use cases to grow the market for industrial applications,” explains Ken Feen, ADI’s senior director, consumer marketing. This is what is called an ‘anchor project’, matching hardware and software to a use case, for example, finding the appropriate digital signal processor for voice processing in a VR headset. Part of the role of Catalyst is to find use cases to grow the market for applications, adds Michael Corrigan, system application engineer at ADI.
Automotive
The automotive part of the facility is dedicated to battery management systems, particularly for EVs, and includes the wireless battery management system (wBMS), demonstrating how RF signals can provide a robust battery system that is resistant to jamming.
There is also the dynamic-sounding ACE team – dedicated to the Automotive Cabin Experience. Andrew Lanfear, general manager, Automotive Audio & Networking at ADI, explained that automotive design is moving from domain functionality, for example, audio or advanced driver assistance system domains, to a zonal structure, where “all capabilities are needed in that zone, for example immersive 3D sound”.
There are approximately 1,650 people on the campus, including 750 R&D engineers. ADI also works with the University of Limerick on a computer science programme that includes industry experience. It offers a Catalyst engineering residency for engineering students “from Limerick and beyond”, says Mchugh.
Limerick is an excellent location for innovation, he continues. “There’s a strong focus on science, and education is highly valued in Ireland.”
Partnership for RF testing
ADI’s wBMS is ISO21434 CAL4-compliant for cybersecurity. Earlier this year Rohde & Schwarz unveiled the jointly developed compact, automated test equipment system for wBMS (pictured). The off-the-air recording system captures real world RF spectrum to record and verify the operation of wireless devices.
The R&S CMW100 radio communication tester is combined with Rohde & Schwarz’s WMT wireless automated testing software framework, ExpressTSVP universal test and measurement platform. The device under test is placed in an interference-free environment. According to Rohde & Schwarz this allows a realistic, repeatable and efficient verification of wireless devices. During several test drives in various complex RF environments, an FSW signal and spectrum analyser monitored the RF spectrum and sent it to an IQW wideband I/Q data recorder. The data recorder is connected with an SMW200A vector signal generator to play back the recorded spectrum profiles in a lab.
Juergen Meyer, vice-president Automotive at Rohde & Schwarz, comments: “We are glad that we are working with ADI to mitigate wBMS test challenges from R&D to mass production, maximise the robustness and performance of wBMS and help enable the automotive industry to fulfil the potential offered by wBMS.”
