Power System and Vehicle Charging Integration

EV Charging Case Study

Integrating EV charging into a metering smart breaker sounds straightforward until you get into the electrical architecture. Ground isolation, noise management, metrology accuracy, J1772 communication compliance, and UL functional safety requirements all have to be solved in a single product, built for a global market, and transferred to production at scale. For this global breaker technology company, the project was a disruptive entry into the EV charging market, one that required a complete design and prototyping effort from electronics through production tooling.

DE Design Works took on the full development scope and coordinated across three US offices, China, Dominican Republic, and UK engineering groups to bring it across the finish line.

Customer: Global breaker technology company

Our Responsibilities:

  • Complete design and prototyping of EV charger integrated with a metering smart breaker
  • Solved ground/isolation and noise challenges across the electrical architecture
  • Collaborated with customer on:
    • Solutions for mechanical and materials challenges
    • Vendor component quality
    • Alternate silicon supply sources
    • UL functional safety compliance
  • J1772 EV communication, Level 2 charging, metrology, IoT cloud connectivity, and OTA updates
  • Environmental, power testing, and car charge testing
  • Project management and coordination across three USA offices, China, Dominican Republic, and UK groups
  • Design and build of production-automated tools for QA
  • Transfer to production

The DE Team Win:

EV market introduction of a disruptive product with a backlog of pre-orders for a long-term Fortune 500 customer

Our Process

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Frequently Asked Questions

What made the electrical architecture on this project particularly difficult?

Combining EV charging with a metering smart breaker puts high-voltage power conversion, precision metrology, digital communications, and IoT connectivity into a single enclosure. Each of those subsystems brings its own noise profile and ground reference requirements, and they don't naturally coexist cleanly. Getting accurate metrology readings while a Level 2 charger is switching current, maintaining J1772 communication signal integrity in that environment, and doing all of it while meeting UL functional safety requirements required careful isolation strategy and noise mitigation designed into the hardware from the start, not addressed after the fact.

Why did this project require coordination across so many locations?

The customer's engineering and supply chain responsibilities were distributed across three US offices, China, Dominican Republic, and UK groups, each owning different pieces of the product. A project with that many stakeholders across that many time zones doesn't succeed on technical merit alone. DE Design Works took on project management across all of those groups, which meant clear interface definitions, disciplined documentation, and enough coordination structure that decisions made in one location didn't create problems for teams working in another.

What is J1772 and why does it matter for a smart breaker product?

J1772 is the North American standard for AC EV charging communication between the charging station and the vehicle. It defines the pilot signal protocol that tells the vehicle how much current is available and manages the handshake that allows charging to begin. For a smart breaker integrating EV charging capability, J1772 compliance isn't optional, it's the baseline requirement for the product to work with any J1772-compatible vehicle on the market. Getting the pilot signal timing and state machine right under real-world load conditions is one of the less obvious but critical firmware challenges in this class of product.

How did DE Design Works handle component availability challenges during development?

Supply chain constraints during this program required identifying and qualifying alternate silicon sources without compromising the electrical design. That meant evaluating replacement components at the schematic level, not just checking pin compatibility, and working with the customer to assess vendor quality before committing to a source. Building those decisions into the design early, rather than discovering incompatibilities during production, kept the program on track.

What does the pre-order backlog tell us about how the product landed in the market?

A backlog of pre-orders from a Fortune 500 customer before the product ships means the market saw something it hadn't seen before and committed to it early. For a product in the EV charging space, where the competition is established and the regulatory bar is high, that kind of commercial response reflects a product that hit its performance targets, passed its certification requirements, and came to market on a timeline that mattered. The engineering result and the commercial result are the same story told two different ways.