Power banks are popular personal accessories for portable electronics like smartphones or tablets, whose stylishly thin profiles mean limited battery capacities. A power bank is a portable secondary battery that stores energy when alternating current (AC) power is not available.
Figure 1 is a power-bank operation board with two USB ports. One port is mini USB, connecting…
When designing industrial PCs, one question that puzzles system engineers is how to improve system efficiency. PC applications use a complex quad core or octa-core processor like the Sitara™ AM57x or Intel’s Apollo Lake or Braswell processor. The power for these processors runs off a 5V bus supply. Most systems use a multistage architecture to drive power from 19V, or a 12V adapter to a 5V bus. In this type of architecture…
From smart watches to fitness trackers, wearable devices are becoming more and more popular. In the case of health monitors for example, data can be measured and then processed and displayed on small, integrated screens. The data can also be delivered to other devices and connect to smartphones via Bluetooth® Smart.
Wearable devices are very small, however, and their components have to be tiny, including the rechargeable…
Stubborn vacuum cords, and giant thick AC power plugs for your drill, can be a mess, and can sometimes be hazardous. Enjoying cordless power tools and garden tools used to be an expensive dream, but as Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries become more and more popular and less expensive, this dream is finally obtainable!
Clear advantages with using Lithium-ion (Li-ion), Li-polymer or Li-iron phosphate (LiFePO4) chemistries…
Power banks sure seem simple. They appear to just be a single-cell lithium battery, a step-up converter (to take varying battery voltage and provide the regulated 5V at the output) and a USB port to connect to the portable device that’s charging. When you look deeper into a typical power bank, however, you may find any number of other subsystems: light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to indicate the battery’s state of charge…
There are four times as many devices connected to the Internet as there are people in the world, and the number of devices is increasing rapidly. The Internet of Things (IoT) enables businesses, communities and individuals to gather data through connected devices.
Wearable devices such as activity monitors and smart watches are the most common IoT devices today. Wearables monitor your activity and fitness by measuring…
A key design challenge for creating an audio amplifier is generating its power supply voltage. When using a single-cell lithium battery as the power source, a boost converter raises this voltage to bias the audio amplifier. The boosted-voltage level is a trade-off between audio quality and power consumption. You would like to boost the supply voltage high enough to never distort…
From the perspective of cell numbers in series, the battery fuel-gauge world has always been binary. You could either opt for a single-cell gauge or a 2-4 series multi-cell gauge in your designs. The binary world works great if all of your designs fall in either the 1S or 4S bucket – but if it falls in-between like in laptops, wearables and drones, tough luck!
It’s because of the key differences between multicell…
You might have heard of phrases like “gauge made easy,” “easy-to-use gauge,” “value-gauge products” or even “gauge in a few clicks.” The truth is that there is no easy way to make a “good” battery fuel gauge, but engineers at Texas Instruments have managed to ease initial gauge configuration simply by using the information on the back of the battery pack. In this blog post, I’ll explain…
If you have just designed in an Impedance Track™ gas gauge, this post will help you get started with the essential learning cycle you’ll need to achieve the best accuracy. A learning cycle is when you cycle your battery for the first time using an Impedance Track technology-based gas gauge. The learning cycle optimizes certain parameters that track the battery’s chemical capacity…
Batteries: the unsung hero of any mobile phone, tablet or notebook PC. This piece of technology remains unappreciated, because despite every charge we still wish our devices would last longer. And that’s too bad, because the battery pack represents some really great engineering.
Did you know that batteries are one of the oldest technologies? They date back more than two centuries to the Parthian Empire (approximately…
It’s a spectacular time to be working in the world of batteries these days — sure, we hear a lot about wearables, smartphones and improbably tiny wireless headphones, but there’s an equally fascinating bloom of innovation happening at the other end of the portables spectrum. I’m talking big battery applications like delivery or industrial drones, battery-backup and energy-storage systems, and electric bikes and scooters…
Test and measurement equipment such as oscilloscopes and waveform generators has its own set of design challenges, from increasing measurement accuracy to providing a low-cost solution to the customer. Measurement accuracy, bandwidth and throughput (or channel count) are critically important to engineers using test equipment, but cost is key as well; after all, managers often must justify equipment purchases by showing…
Now you’ve seen it for yourself: a complete reference design for a wearable subsystem. Figure 1 shows a passive matrix organic light-emitting diode (PMOLED) display powered directly from the TPS61046 boost converter. As I hope you can clearly see, it powers the display cleanly with no visual deficits. This is just as you would like to see it if you were designing a wearable or medical device with such a display…
A common requirement in battery-powered applications like metering, handheld or wearable products is to know the charge level of the battery. With this information, the system MCU can estimate the runtime and signal when the battery needs replacing or recharging.
The easiest way to get the status of the battery is to feed the battery voltage into an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and process the data. Scaling down…
Power-supply designers have used various forms of Equation 1 for decades in order to select the correct inductance for their step-down (buck) converters. While Equation 1 is still correct, why should you use it in low-power step-down converter designs?
(1)
Typically, Equation 1 swaps the inductance, L, and the inductor ripple current, ΔIL, in order to solve for L based on a given ΔIL. ΔIL is usually…
In the not-too-distant future – some believe as early as 2030 – a manned spacecraft will blast off from Earth. The spacecraft will be designed to travel to deep space, traveling further than any other. Its destination: the red planet, after a demanding 200-million-mile journey lasting nearly six months.
But just what will Mars be like? It will be impossible to answer that question until humans actually…
USB Type-C multiport adapters are gaining popularity among business travelers (like me) due to demand for the lightest and thinnest notebooks. These adapters allow the offloading of data (such as USB 2.0), video (such as VGA, HDMI) and power connectors from the notebook, making it possible to reach form factors that otherwise would not be possible. While it is exciting to see the thinner form-factors enabled by the USB…
Power banks can be indispensable on a long flight or during a long meeting if you need to recharge your smartphone’s or tablet’s battery. Having previously charged up your power bank, you efficiently transfer its energy to your portable device to achieve a longer runtime. In order to give your device sufficient energy, the power bank should have a high-capacity battery – on an order of magnitude of your device…
If you are a designing a fitness band, smartwatch, heart-rate monitor, portable medical equipment or car-ignition starter, what is your biggest concern? Most likely, it’s how to elongate the operating life of the wearable or ignition starter.
There are multiple options available to solve this problem:
Predicting the remaining capacity of lithium-ion batteries can be difficult given the many factors influencing gas-gauge ICs; cold temperatures are one of those factors. There are several gas-gauging ICs on the market that have several features to provide accurate performance for operation at cold temperatures that we will highlight in this blog. In this blog, I’ll discuss some of the parameters to accurate gas gauging…
Happy birthday to micro system-in-package (MicroSiPTM)! TI announced this very innovative power-supply solution for exceptionally space-constrained applications (such as personal electronics devices) five years ago this month. The initial TPS82671 fully integrated step-down converter module opened the way for a whole series of devices that incorporate all required passives into a tiny 2.3mm-by-2.9mm package. You don…
The first smartphones with integrated wireless power were released in 2011; since then, the Wireless Power Consortium has certified over 800 different products. Most of these products are smartphone or transmitter related.
Wireless Power offers significant benefits beyond the improved convenience offered in smart phone space – for example, the opportunity…
The drone industry is expected to grow in the coming years, with an estimate from the Consumer Electronics Association that drone flights will reach 1 million per day by 2035. Applications will be as far ranging as delivering goods from shopkeepers to your doorstep to delivering organs from donors to waiting patients.
The level of business investment is also increasing…
When you hear the term “gas gauge,” the first thought that comes to mind might be the gauge in your car. You depend on the accuracy of that gauge to keep you from getting stuck on the side of the road. Likewise, for your portable electronic devices, you depend on the accuracy of your battery’s “gas gauge.”
Figure 1: Gauge predicts how much capacity…
