A Hardware/Software Fuel Gauge Analog-to-Digital Converter Solution for Mobile Electronics Applications

Abstract

Power consumption is one of the key considerations in any mobile electronics design. As technology roadmaps advance in the mobile and wearable markets, there will be an evident push for lower power consumption in terms of chipsets and applications. With this in mind, battery technology will have to keep up with higher energy densities, lower cost, and all the while, also reducing the overall dimensions as size is one of the other major constraints in most mobile/wearable designs. Emphasizing a well thought-out power system design is necessary to optimize battery usage. This is especially important as companies creating battery-powered devices will continue to want to maximize the usage of the battery to give its users a high quality user experience.

An important aspect of power system design is the fuel gauge algorithm. A fuel gauge is a measurement and reporting tool that gives a user the ability to understand the status and capacity of the battery. This thesis delivers a full solution which includes a Successive Approximation Register Analog-to-Digital Converter to provide the necessary hardware to collect the measurements of the battery and a fuel gauge algorithm which implements the design in software to report the battery life to the user.