Smart Battery Monitor IC

N/ASmart Battery Monitor IC makes battery management features formerly relegated to high-end systems cost-effective for a variety of portable products. It stores battery-specific data and tracks battery parameters, including temperature, voltage, current and remaining charge. The IC provides battery data and battery measurements (which must be done in the pack) to the host-system's processor (an existing resource) where charge-control and remaining-charge algorithms are executed in software.

The company's 1-Wire network technology enables the pack-resident IC to communicate with portable products over a single wire. By using the network, products and battery packs can connect using just three electrical contactspower, ground and data. Each IC gives its battery pack a guaranteed-unique 64-bit net address, allowing multiple battery packs to be wired to a single bus but addressed individually. This in turn enables products to connect to two or more batteries simultaneously, supporting dual-battery operation or gang charging.

The device provides 40 bytes of nonvolatile EEPROM memory for storage of battery-specific data. In addition to data storage, it also provides a complete set of battery instrumentation. The IC measures battery temperature with 0.03µC resolution and battery voltage with 10 mV resolution. The device also measures battery current with 10-bit resolution and integrates current over time to facilitate fuel gauging. A built-in offset-cancellation feature improves current measurement accuracy over previous devices. All of this measurement data is available to the portable product for charge-control, remaining-charge estimation and other battery monitoring tasks.

<%=company%>, 4401 S. Beltwood Pkwy., Dallas, TX 75244. Phone: 972-371-4000; Fax: 972-371-3715.