Battery-Management Chip Offers 1-mV Accuracy

Jan. 5, 2023

Texas Instruments introduced its latest battery-management chip that's designed to provide more accurate mileage estimates for electric vehicles.

William G. Wong

Related To: Electronic Design

Check out more of our CES 2023 coverage

Texas Instruments unveiled its latest battery monitor, the BQ79718-Q1 (see figure), for electric-vehicle (EV) battery-management systems (BMS). It can provide a more accurate range estimate for an EV thanks to the 1-mV accuracy of its sensors. I talked with Sam Wong, General Manager for Texas Instrument's Battery Management Solutions, about the chip and its design.

The BQ7918-Q1 battery monitor is designed to handle an array of cells for an electric vehicle.

One of the challenges TI encountered with such a sensitive sensing platform was maintaining the accuracy while putting it in a package to meet automotive ASIL D requirements. The chip is AEC-Q100-qualified with a temperature range of -40 to +125°C. It can measure from 9 to 18 cells per device with up to 35 devices per system.

Check out more of our CES 2023 coverage

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.>

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.