ISSCC 2025: An On-Cell Monitoring and Balancing System With Near Field Communications for EV Batteries

A Dukosi technical paper was accepted and presented at ISSCC 2025 in the Digital Techniques for System Adaptation, Power Management and Clocking Session. The paper titled ”An On-Cell Monitoring and Balancing System with Near-Field Communications for EV Batteries” was co-authored by Dukosi’s Daniel McMitchell, Scott Block, and Simon Foster. The paper and poster presented at the event are available below.

Abstract:

A battery cell monitoring system for automotive and grid energy storage applications is presented. It is the first commercially available single-chip-on-cell near field contactless solution for automotive cell monitoring. This architecture eliminates complex wiring and point-of-failure wire joins, increases battery pack density and simplifies pack assembly. The distributed cell-level processing and data storage support cell traceability and pack refurbishment into second+ life applications.

As part of a battery management system (BMS) it enhances pack performance and reliability, and safety with timely identification of faults and performance loss. It comprises two subsystem types: (i) the System Hub (SH) mounted at the module or pack level, and (ii) the Cell Monitor (CM) mounted one per cell, which reports on its respective cell and performs charge balancing. Up to 216 CMs are supported per SH.

Three essential features of the system are presented: 1) CM chip architecture; 2) Network robustness: the serial contactless communication and network formation; and 3) Cell reusability: the per-cell distributed processing and data storage.

The published paper is available on IEEE Xplore: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10904765