Renesas extends battery life for tablets and notebook PCs

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Renesas Electronics Corp, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, says its new lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery fuel gauge IC, the RAJ240500, is designed to extend battery life for connected mobile devices such as tablets, notebook PCs and smartphones.

Leveraging its extensive design expertise in fuel gauge and charging ICs for mobile devices, Renesas has developed a single-chip device that delivers high-precision battery charge measurement and control that reduces the burden on the battery and contributes to longer device battery life. In addition, in order to facilitate the development using this product, Renesas is offering sample codes and evaluation tools as solutions, including the reference card circuit diagram.

Battery life has become an important decision factor for consumers purchasing mobile devices such as tablets and notebook PCs, creating strong demand for efficient battery charging and control technologies. In the past, battery control circuits had to treat the battery as being at ‘zero charge’ even when there was still some capacity remaining, and as ‘fully charged’ even when charging was not yet complete, in order to assure the safety of the battery. The resulting design challenge was a shorter battery life relative to charge capacity.

Battery degradation is another challenge. Li-ion batteries suffer from reduced capacity after repeated charge-discharge cycles due to deterioration of the materials they are made from. Repeated control when not fully charged or fully discharged reduces the number of charge-discharge cycles over the service life of the battery, which for many devices is equivalent to the service life of the device. To extend the usable battery duration and enable longer battery life while accounting for typical wear-and-tear changes, designers require charge control that decreases the burden placed on the battery and that reduces degradation as far as possible.