STAR2011

Battery Management Unit / Gas Gauge

Description

STAR2011 is an ultra-low power Battery Management Unit (BMU) designed to provide voltage and charge monitoring of a battery. The BMU is designed to monitor the voltage and current levels of a battery cell, using two delta-sigma ADC's. A 10b ADC with a single-ended input voltage range of 0 to 250mV is used to measure the battery voltage through an internal voltage-divider from the external battery voltage. A 10b ADC with single-ended input voltage range of -250mV to 250mV is used to measure the voltage across a resistor which is placed in series with the battery cell for current measurement.

Power-on-reset (POR) and Low-voltage-detect (LVD) circuits are designed to produce digital control signals/flags to indicated the state of the battery voltage when the battery is close to it's end of life (<0.8V) when the ADC measurements of the battery are unreliable or invalid. POR, with it's threshold set nominally at 0.6V, provides the power-on-reset function as well as indicates that the battery is in the 'dead zone'. The LVD circuit is designed to have 2 thresholds: LVD1 and LVD2. LVD1 is set nominally at 0.6V which indicates that the battery is in the 'danger-zone' whereas LVD2 is set nominally at 0.8V which indicates that the battery is in the 'safe-zone'. Test time programmability of the POR, LVD1, LVD2 are provided for users to fine-adjust the threshold levels.

An internal clock generator provides a 32.768KHz master clock for the ADCs, and can also be used for the SoC that uses this BMU macro. The actual clock frequency can be factory calibrated to within +/-1% accuracy; the calibration bits are then stored into OTP which can be auto-loaded in the field. For hearing-aid systems, STAR2011 acts as a smart power-control-unit which can generate control signals to enable various sub-blocks of the overall system to power on/off safely for different states of charge in the battery.

Features

  • Single-cell operation: 0.6V<VDD<1.1V

  • Low power consumption: <50uA

  • 16b A/D conversion for battery voltage monitoring & management

  • 16b A/D conversion for battery charge/current monitoring & management

  • POR (power-on-reset); POR threshold = 0.6V with +/-5% accuracy; 3bit test-time-programmable through OTP

  • LVD (low-voltage detect); 2 LVD threshold levels: LVD1=0.6V LVD2=0.8V each with +/-5% accuracy; 3bit test-time-programmable through OTP for each of LVD1 and LVD2

  • POR & LVD provides battery state flags/indicators: dead/dangerous/safe zones.

  • 8bit digital output integrated temperature sensor

  • Internal clock generator 32.678KHz without the need of a crystal reference; factory calibrated to +/-1% accurate using auto-load OTP

  • I2C control interfaces

  • 65nm CMOS process

  • Macro area: 1mm x 0.25mm

STAR2011 block diagram

STAR2011 block diagram

 

Applications

  • On-chip battery monitoring function

  • Smart power-control-unit

  • Base-band digitization for DC type signals with slowly varying bandwidth

 

IP deliverables

  • .gds layout database

  • .lib liberty timing models

  • .lef layout exchange format files

  • Extensive documentation

  • Customer support/integration package

  • Design usage training

  • Schematics available

  • Secured online portal