Primary Power Distribution Center
Modern cars feature numerous advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). All safety-critical ADAS applications must be designed for high availability. Automated driving functions are even more challenging to implement as these introduce fail operational requirements and the so called “dependable electronics” which enable systems that are the foundation for trust. More details, you can find on the Infineon “dependable electronics” pages.
The impact of these application requirements on the primary power distribution is the introduction of safety elements to guaranty a fast failure isolation in less than 100 … 500 µs. As fuses can’t fulfil this requirement, a partial or full electrification of the primary power distribution is the consequence. The electrical part of the primary power distribution is no longer called a Pre-Fuse Box, but primary Power Distribution Center (primary PDC).
The primary PDC is a functional block with supply, control, communication and sense & actuation functions. Infineon provides a complete chipset solution for the primary PDC to simplify design-in with scalable product families.

The power distribution safety elements have the task to prevent the available Power Distribution System against undervoltage or overvoltage.
There are several reasons why the safety elements have to be implemented by semiconductor:
- One is the diagnostic coverage of semiconductor at 99% compared to fuses, which are on the order of 40%...60%.
- Another is the failure isolation response time. Isolation in less than 100…500 µs is required, which only a semiconductor-based solution can realize. Fuses or relays need much more time and are in the range of several milli seconds.

In case of the power distribution system, dependable power is the failure-tolerant supply and distribution of energy throughout the vehicle. The most common physical solution is a redundant supply and distribution of energy to the safety critical applications. Such systems mandatorily require safety elements to prevent the power distribution system against undervoltage or overvoltage:
Customer benefits
We support with a two decades expertise in Power Distribution applications, know how in relay & fuse replacement, products with high energy capability, technical documents, evaluations boards and simulation models to enable easy design-in & fast time to market.
- Relay & Fuse replacement Application Notes
- Relay & Fuse replacement Whitepaper
- Arduino shields for easy to use device evaluation
- Simulation models for virtual prototyping and system evaluation
Semiconductor based Intelligent Power Distribution is replacing classical electro-mechanical relay & fuse boxes. We offer a broad range of scalable product families to enable module designs scalable across the manifold variations of OEM platforms.
- Modular family concepts with respect to performance, memory, peripherals and
safety & security implementation. - Wide range of feature set from basic to high performance within the product families in pin-to-pin compatible packages with the same footprint.
Modern OEM platforms do have billions of variants in wire harness and an increasing number of load configurations in the Power Distribution. To handle such a complexity and often short notice modifications, we offer product families with unique flexibility.
- Power product families are highly scalable in current, energy and power dissipation with pin-to-pin compatible packages and the same footprint.
- Product families with SPI enable the configuration of e.g. channel parallelization, restart strategy, slew rate, protection and diagnosis.
Trends like Safety Application availability and Automated Drive functions introduce Functional Safety requirements in Power Distribution. We offer for module designs product families qualified correspondingly and supporting required ASIL levels.
- AEC-Q 100/101 qualification, short circuit robustness & low ppb rates and several product families qualified according to AEC-Q100 Grade 0.
- Product families for safety critical applications are available to support ASIL-B or ASIL-D
according to ISO26262 Functional Safety.
For product related support material, please have a look into the product pages
Supply and communication
OPTIREGTM System Basis Chip (SBC)
Microcontroller
TraveoTM II and/ or AURIX™ TriCore™
High-Side Switches, Gate Driver and MOSFET

In this training, you will:
- Indicate what an electrical power distribution center is and describe what solutions Infineon offers for
- Explain why relays and fuses are being replaced with semiconductors and identify the devices that Infineon provides for replacing

Description:
- Explain how the major automotive trends are shaping the evolution of electrical and electronic or E/E architectures in cars
- Identify the trending E/E architecture concepts and their impact on networking technologies and recognize the solutions that Infineon provides to support current and future E/E architectures

In this training, you will:
- Understand what a body control module is and what solutions Infineon offers for standard and high-end body control modules
- Discover why relays and fuses are being replaced with smart switches and identify Infineon's alternative devices