While on co-op at Tesla, electrical and computer engineering student Kaden Du worked to make it easier to test voltage regulators and identify where any failure is coming from.
For a battery-powered car to be safe, it’s critical that the power source can be disconnected if voltage levels are too high. It’s up to a tiny voltage regulator circuit to maintain consistent voltage so the battery doesn’t overheat.
But this safety protocol only works if the voltage regulators themselves function perfectly.
Last semester, when Northeastern University electrical and computer engineering student Kaden Du started his co-op at Tesla, he built a system to help make it easier to test analog circuits on the high voltage controller board, including the voltage regulators, and identify where any failure is coming from.
“When you test the boards that the circuits are connected to, you have to solder onto them and attach the wiring in such a way that you can actually see what was going on,” Du says. “The test system I was designing would look at all the signals at once in order to automate this test process.”
A voltage regulator is just one of the circuits on a high voltage controller board, which is about the size of a computer keyboard. Du’s job was to develop and evaluate tests for controller boards.
Du’s team simulated conditions to test the controller board function. Boards were placed in thermal chambers, for example, to test how they handle extreme heat or cold.
“Let’s say we have a component fail,” Du says. “I have to figure out why that happened and how we can prevent it from happening in the future.”
Testing can be repetitive, Du says. When he started the co-op there was a system in development to automate some tests, but it wasn’t complete. Du took a look at the system’s design and thought it could be improved.
“I convinced my manager to do a completely different switch in how the project looked,” he says. “I re-architected it from the beginning and got it to a point where it was working pretty well.”
The test system can look at all signals at once and switch between different voltages, to simplify and automate the test process.
“It’s a system that can look at everything and switch what it’s looking at,” Du says.
Du, who grew up in Boulder, Colorado, will graduate in May with an honors bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering. Working at Tesla was his second co-op, but his first also involved circuit board design while helping to develop steerable antennas at Notch Technologies, a startup in Cambridge supported by The Engine at MIT.
Du said both co-ops provided valuable experience. Working on projects at Notch with shorter design cycles meant collaborating closely with a small team on proof-of-concept projects. At Tesla, he says, the design cycles span years but there are more resources to make innovations possible — like the test system Du refined and built — with the objective of making millions of products.
But the biggest lesson he took away from working at Tesla was how to design systems that are reliable and also can be mass-manufactured.
“I got to work with the reliability team and figure out how to make products that are going to work for years in volatile situations,” he says. “That’s a completely different type of engineering in my mind.”