2017-11-10

The ISL78610 battery monitor provides cell balancing and accurate voltage and temperature monitoring to safeguard Li-ion battery packs in hybrid electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and electric vehicles. System designers can use the ISL78610 as a standalone battery-pack monitor or as a redundant back-up device when combined with the high accuracy ISL78600 multi-cell battery manager. This powerful combination enables automobile manufacturers to achieve the higher ISO 26262 automotive safety integrity level (ASIL) D rating.


In this video, learn how to set-up the ISL78610 and ISL78600 evaluation boards in a daisy chain configuration, and get a quick overview of the GUI software.

Transcript

ISL78610: Automotive-grade 12-Cell Li-ion Battery Pack Monitor

Hi, I'm Gary MacDonald, and I'm an Automotive Marketing Manager for the multi-cell balancing product line at Intersil. Today, I would like to introduce the ISL78610. This device is an automotive grade 12-cell lithium ion battery pack monitor, and I want to demonstrate how easy it is to set up and work with using the evaluation kit and GUI software.

The part is fully automotive compliant and designed to meet the stringent safety, reliability and performance requirements of a next-generation HEV, PHEV and EV application. The ISL78610 can be used as a standalone battery monitor or as redundant backup in an ASIL compliant system. It measures and monitors cell voltages, temperatures, includes cell balancing, and provides full diagnostics and fault detection for lithium ion battery packs.

ISL78610 Evaluation Kit

The eval kit contains three boards: one eval board, one power supply board, and one microcontroller interface board. It also contains a PC interface cable and one interconnect cable.

The power supply board simulates the individual cell inputs and removes the need to have an actual cell stack. It's a resistive divider which takes the supply voltage from a power supply and then divides it down into the individual cell voltages.

The microcontroller board provides the interface to a PC. I preinstalled the GUI on my PC as a demonstration. The GUI, along with a full suite of application notes, FAQs and datasheets, can be downloaded from the ISL78610 product page on our website.

For demonstration purposes, I've set up two boards here in a daisy chain configuration. If you wish to evaluate the boards in a daisy chain configuration, then you should order one eval kit for each device in the daisy chain. In this case, that would be two kits. Up to 14 boards can be daisy chained together using a simple twisted pair up to one meter in length.

I'd like to now show you some features of the part using the GUI for illustration.

Continuous Polling

The part has three voltage scanning modes. I will demonstrate the Scan All mode using the continuous polling feature of the GUI. Here you can see each cell voltage being continuously read. The polling rate can be selected and then adjusted by the user.

Fault Detection

The device has a full suite of diagnostics and fault detection as required by AEC-Q100 and ISO26262. This includes open wire detection which detects whether there has been a disconnection of cell reading wires during operation. I'll demonstrate an open wire condition using this DIP switch. You can see the GUI is now reporting a fault, and there's a useful LED indicator on the eval board, itself.

Charting in the GUI

Another really useful feature of the GUI is its charting capability. By clicking on this tab, you can see various user selectable parameters being charted. Charts can be exported to other applications, such as Excel for example, for further analysis.

Summary

For more detailed instructions to assist with the design and deployment process, please refer to the ISL78610 product page on our website. Thank you for listening.