Renesas RAA489206 and RAA489204 multi-cell battery front end ICs

Renesas Electronics has introduced a family of multi-cell battery front end (BFE) ICs for battery management systems (BMS), built for the large, high-voltage battery packs that power e-scooters, energy storage, high-voltage power tools and other high-voltage equipment.

The ICs provide fast, flexible cell balancing up to 200 mA and over — a critical function to enable fast recharging and high utilisation in large battery packs with hot plug tolerance up to 62 V. They have been built with the high performance, flexibility and integration to help users simplify the design process and create robust battery systems.

Designed for higher-voltage mobility applications where larger cell count and temperature variance across cells are more likely to lead to cell-to-cell imbalances, the RAA489206 provides full high-side battery protection and monitoring for 4 to 16S cell battery packs. The RAA489204 provides improved daisy-chain operation with accelerated device-to-device communication and enhanced diagnostics compared with previous-generation devices, as well as internal cell balancing options and support for the higher voltages and cell count required by UPS systems, grid backup and other energy storage systems.

The ICs’ high integration should simplify the design cycle and reduce system BOM costs, accelerating design and BOM selection time from months to weeks. The ICs also feature extensive built-in self-diagnostics, improving their safety functionality, reducing firmware workload and easing the design burden for meeting safety standards. Pin-to-pin compatibility with Renesas’s previous BFE devices simplifies the design cycle even further, offering users a quick and seamless migration path.