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Li-ion Battery-Management Platforms Come with Pre-Validated Firmware

April 21, 2025

Power-management solutions developed by Renesas help simplify battery-pack design with fuel-gauge ICs, MCU, pre-validated firmware, software, and documentation.

Lee Goldberg

Related To:

Electronic Design

At APEC 2025, Renesas introduced several near-turnkey hardware/software solutions for managing lithium-ion battery packs in a wide range of battery-powered consumer products, such as e-bikes, vacuum cleaners, robotics, and drones. Known as Ready Battery Management System with Fixed Firmware (R-BMS-F), these solutions are designed to address applications using Li-ion batteries in both 2-4 and 3-10 cell series (S).

Each reference design includes Renesas’s one-chip fuel-gauge ICs (FGICs), an integrated microcontroller (MCU) and analog battery front end, pre-validated firmware, software, development tools, and full documentation:

The R-BMS F for 2-4S cell solutions (~8 to 16 V) target small vacuum cleaners, robotic vacuums, consumer, and medical devices and run on Renesas’s RAJ240055 Li-ion battery FGIC.
The 3-10 cell (RTK0EF0136DK0002BU) R-BMS F solutions target applications such as e-bikes, e-mobility, vacuum cleaners, robotics, drones, and industrial/consumer/medical systems. They run on the company’s RAJ240100 and RAJ240090 Li-ion battery FGICs.

Each application-specific solution’s firmware has been optimized to perform highly accurate monitoring of the batteries’ state of charge (SOC), state of health (SOH), current, and temperature. It also actively balances the voltages of the individual cells to keep the batteries operating in a safe temperature region and ensure adequate battery life over many charge/discharge cycles.

For added flexibility, the battery-management system lets developers set many parameters to meet specific requirements and optimize its performance for different cell chemistries via a graphical user interface (GUI).

Both R BMS-F solutions are available today in production volumes. Additional information can be found here.

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About the Author

Lee Goldberg | Contributing Editor

Lee Goldberg is a self-identified “Recovering Engineer,” Maker/Hacker, Green-Tech Maven, Aviator, Gadfly, and Geek Dad. He spent the first 18 years of his career helping design microprocessors, embedded systems, renewable energy applications, and the occasional interplanetary spacecraft. After trading his ‘scope and soldering iron for a keyboard and a second career as a tech journalist, he’s spent the next two decades at several print and online engineering publications.

Lee’s current focus is power electronics, especially the technologies involved with energy efficiency, energy management, and renewable energy. This dovetails with his coverage of sustainable technologies and various environmental and social issues within the engineering community that he began in 1996. Lee also covers 3D printers, open-source hardware, and other Maker/Hacker technologies.

Lee holds a BSEE in Electrical Engineering from Thomas Edison College, and participated in a colloquium on technology, society, and the environment at Goddard College’s Institute for Social Ecology. His book, “Green Electronics/Green Bottom Line - A Commonsense Guide To Environmentally Responsible Engineering and Management,” was published by Newnes Press.

Lee, his wife Catherine, and his daughter Anwyn currently reside in the outskirts of Princeton N.J., where they masquerade as a typical suburban family.

Lee also writes the regular PowerBites series.