Hi,
I made a design using BQ24610 to charge a 4-cell battery pack to 16.8V. It seemd working well in prototypes and was released to production. When the sales person demostrated the product frequently, some devices showed strange behaviors occationally:
The battery charger charged the battery for a while, then stop charging. No LED turned on, and never recovered even all enable charge conditions were valid. The only way to activate the charging again was unplugging-plugging the AC adaptor. The chance to see this behavior happenning is ~20%. Since the charge cycle was pretty long, it took a while to catch the problem.
But it couldn't be explained after I read the datasheet carefully. In the beginning I though it could be thermal shutdown with high die temp, but if that was the case the charger should soft-start again once the temperature dropped. I didn't think it was TTC timer fault because I had more than 5 hours for timeout. I saw it happened twice in an hour after AC adaptor plugged. I used 18V adaptor to charge 14.8V (16.8V full charged) battery pack, there was no chance for input over-voltage or under-voltage.
It seemed the charging action was suspended, but I could figure out the cause. By the way, the battery temperature was not monitored, the TS voltage was set to constant 1.7V with voltage divider. My fast charge current was set to 2A, the precharge/termination current was set to 0.3A.
Does anybody notice the similar problem? Could it be a bug for the IC itself?
Thank you for answering my question.
Daniel