The Qorvo PAC22140 Smart Battery Monitoring System (BMS) can monitor 10- to 20-series Li-ion, Li-polymer, and LiFePO4 battery packs. Integrating a flash-programmable MCU as well as power management, and current, voltage, and temperature sensing, plus drivers for the charge/discharge FETs, the device can communicate using UART/SPI or I2C/SMBus interfaces. The PAC22140 has an Arm Cortex-M0 with 32 kB of flash and 8 kB of SRAM with different analog and digital peripherals for the fuel-gauging algorithm and system telemetry.
A 145-V-input buck dc-dc controller generates the gate-drive voltages, as well as all of the sub-regulators required for the microcontroller and other subsystems, with high-side gate drivers and a low-side driver for the battery-pack fuse. Additional features of the 9- × 9-mm, 60-pin QFN packaged device include an integrated programmable-gain differential amplifier, 16-bit sigma-delta analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) for current sense and cell balancing, and a 10-bit SAR ADC for added voltage and temperature sensing.
An Army veteran, Alix Paultre was a signals intelligence soldier on the East/West German border in the early ‘80s, and eventually wound up helping launch and run a publication on consumer electronics for the US military stationed in Europe. Alix first began in this industry in 1998 at Electronic Products magazine, and since then has worked for a variety of publications in the embedded electronic engineering space. Alix currently lives in Wiesbaden, Germany.
Also check out his YouTube watch-collecting channel, Talking Timepieces.
