BorgWarner, an American auto parts supplier, has opened the India Propulsion Engineering Centre (IPEC) in Whitefield, Bengaluru. With a 95,000-square-foot footprint and 320 software and electronics engineers on staff, the new facility in Whitefield is responsible for developing electronics and electrification products. By the end of 2023, the company wants to have 550 engineers on staff.
BorgWarner will focus on developing EV-specific product inverters. DC-DC converters, onboard chargers, integrated drive modules, and battery management systems (BMS), are in line with its roadmap of targeting 45% revenues from EV components by 2030. It will also, however, develop propulsion controllers for internal-combustion engines and transmissions at this new facility.
The new tech center will specialize in systems, software, and electronic-hardware engineering, and will offer end-to-end development, testing and validation support to BorgWarner’s engineering centers across three continents – North America, Europe, and Asia.
The company will also leverage Indian software talent to focus on the areas of functional safety, as well as cybersecurity, and build and expand its capabilities in these domains.
Guenther Raab, vice-president, of Engineering, BorgWarner PowerDrive Systems told Autocar Professional. BorgWarner’s engineers at the IPEC will develop system architectures using Enterprise Architect and Polarion-based tools, conduct modeling simulations with Matlab Simulink-based models, use Creo tools for the mechanical design of electronic products, and leverage software suite to build software for these components. The facility will also deploy simulation and fully-integrated systems of electro-mechanical drive systems and build engineering capabilities in this domain as well.
“Our idea is to become more efficient and competitive as a supplier, as well as within the engineering vertical in the company,” Chandrasekar Krishnamurthy, global engineering director, Systems, Software and Engineering Excellence, BorgWarner said.
“To support our future growth plans, we would need to scale our engineering resources as well, and with the availability of top-quality software and systems engineers in Bengaluru, we want to tap into that talent pool,” he added.
Krishnamurthy further remarked that the India EV ecosystem is evolving and the company is taking note of the market trajectory of its customers.
“With our global capability in place and also having exposure to specific requirements from the Asia region where we are very strong in countries like China and South Korea, we are strategizing our way forward in terms of positioning ourselves in the Indian market. The recently-concluded Auto Expo 2023 Components Show in New Delhi has given us a lot of insight into the market’s evolution and things look extremely positive from an application’s perspective.
“BorgWarner has registered tremendous success in Europe in catering to OEMs with our high-voltage power electronics for passenger vehicles. We are also seeing a lot of success in China where we can compete with the local suppliers and yet be successful, and more recently, even in North America, our inverter technology is being accepted very well. India has a huge role to play in these products,” Krishnamurthy said.
“There is a common understanding that a technology center in India must have a lot of focus on software, and while there will be software capability at IPEC, it is being planned for full-scale engineering and product development, and that is why the strategic name,” Krishnamurthy signed off.
