Abstract

With the overwhelming increase in the use of Lithium Ion batteries in today’s automobile systems, the design of battery management systems (BMS) is becoming quite crucial. The battery management system monitors the battery and possible fault conditions, preventing the battery from situations in which it can degrade, fade in capacity, or even potentially harm the user or surrounding environment. The BMS is responsible to provide an accurate state-of-charge (SOC) and state-of-health (SOH) estimate to make sure an informative and safe user experience over the lifetime of the battery. Designing a proper BMS is critical not only from a safety point of view, but also for customer satisfaction. There is also definitive move towards solid state disconnects from contractors and this brings in new system design challenges to realize a high current disconnect switch. Robust protection during system fault conditions and low IQ requirement adds another layer of complexity while designing these systems.

This application note highlights how the new TPS1210-Q1 and TPS4810-Q1, low IQ dual high-side driver simplifies the high current disconnect switch design for BMS system with various features such as protection during various system fault conditions, capacitive load driving and diagnosis of the external FETs and the gate driver for safety applications.