Abstract: Qorvo BMS chips optimize and manage battery efficiency and longevity based on six major functions: charge and discharge management, short-circuit protection, over-current and over-voltage protection, battery monitoring, battery balancing, and low-power control.
Due to the continued strong demand for consumer electronics, new energy vehicles, power tools, electric two-wheeled vehicles and other applications, lithium battery applications have entered all aspects of people's lives. At the same time, with the gradual advancement of low-carbon and sustainable development, the photovoltaic energy storage market continues to expand, and emerging application fields such as electric ships and electric aircraft are gradually developing, which in turn drives the continuous expansion of the lithium battery industry.
According to the "White Paper on the Development of China's Lithium-ion Battery Industry (2024)" jointly released by the research institute EVTank, Evie Economic Research Institute and China Battery Industry Research Institute, in 2023, the overall global lithium-ion battery shipments will be 1202.6GWh, a year-on-year increase of 25.6%.
Behind the efficient operation of the battery, it is inseparable from the involvement of the internal battery management system (BMS). On April 11, Qorvo, the world's leading provider of connectivity and power solutions, hosted a media day in Beijing with the theme of "Spring as a Prelude, Everything Becomes More 'Core'".
Qorvo (NASDAQ: QRVO) is committed to providing innovative semiconductor solutions for multiple fast-growing market segments around the world, including consumer electronics, smart home/IoT, automotive, electric vehicles, battery-powered devices, network infrastructure, healthcare and aerospace/defense. In the BMS space, Qorvo showcased a number of innovations and had in-depth discussions on related technologies and market dynamics with the battery network.
Technology precipitation, the achievement of BMS strength players
It can be seen that due to more flexibility and efficiency, more and more devices have begun to switch from traditional AC power to battery power, and with the global carbon reduction trend, greener power supply methods have become the first choice. Therefore, in this context, BMS, which can ensure the safety, stability and service life of the battery, has gradually become the focus of attention in the industry.
In layman's terms, BMS is a system for managing, controlling, and using battery packs. According to the different application voltages, BMS is usually divided into high-voltage system (greater than 48V) and low-voltage system (less than 48V) with 48V as the middle line, of which the high-voltage system is mainly used in new energy vehicles, energy storage and other fields, and the low-voltage system is mainly for power tools, electric two-wheeled vehicles and other fields. Conventional BMS products are almost the same as the detection methods of battery voltage and temperature, and can monitor and collect the status parameters of the battery in real time.
As the importance of BMS in the battery field is becoming more and more obvious, in the long run, the market concentration will increase in the future, and BMS manufacturers may face the pressure of intensified competition, and chips will be the key point for enterprises to break through.
Qorvo's BMS solution focuses on an integrated design, integrating algorithms such as Fuel Gauging, SOC, and SOH into the chip, effectively improving the accuracy and speed of data acquisition and calculation, and enhancing the flexibility of the battery management system.
Qorvo's integration of high-performance MCUs and analog front-end (AFE) into a single chip not only simplifies the system architecture, but also improves system performance, reliability and intelligence. At the same time, it is the industry's first BMS solution that can support precise management of up to 20 strings of cells on a single chip.
Yichi Zhang, senior account manager, Qorvo
"Qorvo's single-chip battery management solution uses hybrid digital-to-analog technology and integrates controller, storage and communication interfaces to provide comprehensive charge/discharge control and monitoring for battery packs of up to 20 cells in series (Li-Ion, Li-Polymer and Li-FeTphosphate)," said Yichi Zhang, senior account manager at Qorvo. With abundant software and hardware development resources, this solution can greatly reduce the development cycle of customers, reduce product costs, and improve product reliability and flexibility. ”
Zhang Yichi mentioned in the communication with the battery network that Qorvo began to plan BMS products around 2021, and some customers have said that the existing discrete BMS products may not be able to meet the application needs well, and Qorvo has many years of experience in single-chip solutions, so it hopes that Qorvo will provide a single-chip BMS solution.
To date, Qorvo BMS chips are in production in two series: the PAC2214x and PAC2514x, both of which are single-chip solutions. Among them, the PAC2214x has a built-in Arm Cortex-M0 MCU with a frequency of 50MHZ and a flash capacity of 32KB, while the PAC2514x uses an Arm Cortex-M4 MCU with a frequency of 150MHZ and a flash capacity of 128KB.
Qorvo BMS chips optimize and manage battery efficiency and longevity based on six key functions: charge and discharge management, short-circuit protection, over-current and over-voltage protection, battery monitoring, battery balancing and low-power control.
It is understood that Qorvo's two BMS chips will officially enter mass production in 2023, because Qorvo's earliest focus is on the application of battery packs in the tool industry, so the first generation of products are mainly used in the field of garden tools and electric two-wheelers.
It is worth mentioning that 48V, 60V and 72V power supplies are commonly found on electric two-wheelers, and Qorvo's BMS chip supports up to 20 strings to cover the complete application needs of customers with different voltages through a single chip, and can achieve compatible designs for different voltages.
Extremely secure, a single chip provides a better solution
According to the statistics of the National Fire and Rescue Administration, more than 25,000 electric bicycle fires were reported across the country in 2023, resulting in 82 deaths.
Driven by the implementation of the new national standard, green travel and other factors, the market demand for lithium batteries for electric bicycles is growing rapidly. However, due to product quality problems, illegal parking, non-standard charging (overcharging, aging lines, improper use of chargers, etc.), and weak safety awareness, electric bicycle fires are frequent and frequent.
At present, the electric bicycle batteries sold on the market are mainly lead-acid batteries and lithium batteries, generally speaking, the safety problems of lithium batteries are mainly manifested as combustion and even explosion, and the root cause is thermal runaway inside the battery.
Safety accidents occur frequently, and the safety of battery packs has attracted more and more attention. In Zhang Yichi's view, the safety of the battery pack mainly comes from two considerations, the first consideration point is whether the quality of the battery cell itself is good or bad, and the second is the protection function and reliability of the battery management system, which plays a core brain-like role in the battery pack, which can judge whether the current battery cell has entered a dangerous state and whether it is necessary to immediately perform the function of protection or early warning.
One of the biggest advantages for Qorvo's BMS solution is the high-performance analog front-end AFE, which can accurately sample the voltage and current status of each channel based on an ADC with a resolution of up to 16 bits. At the same time, this state acquisition involves the second advantage - high real-time performance, Qorvo's BMS solution does not need to be assisted by other chips to make auxiliary judgments, and the MCU can directly sample through the cell sampling and other relevant sensors connected to the MCU, and quickly execute the cell-related state calculation to complete the monitoring and protection function of the cell.
At present, the participating enterprises in the BMS industry are roughly divided into three types: battery manufacturers, automobile companies, and professional third-party BMS companies.
Among them, battery manufacturers such as CATL and vehicle companies such as BYD mainly carry out BMS business in the form of independent R&D and cooperative development. However, due to the more concentrated R&D resources of third-party BMS companies, some battery manufacturers said that they would prefer to focus on the R&D of battery cells, focus their R&D efforts on their main business, and support them through external procurement of professional BMS.
In Zhang Yichi's view, some customers do consider making their own BMS chips, but due to the different core issues that various industries are concerned about, the advantages they play are also different. Qorvo is a professional chip supplier, and the biggest advantage is that Qorvo has a senior and strong chip development team and long-term customer service experience, so Qorvo can understand the needs of customer applications and develop products that match customer systems or applications in the shortest possible time.
Energy storage explodes, and differentiated products provide value
2023 is recognized as the first year of industrial and commercial energy storage in the industry, due to the wide range of application scenarios, and with the release of favorable policies such as peak and valley electricity prices and electricity spots, the business model of new energy storage is becoming more and more mature, and the initial investment cost of the system continues to decrease.
At the same time, with the continuous advancement of the global energy transition strategy and the policy support and subsidies of various governments for household energy storage, the global installed capacity of household energy storage with Europe and the United States as the main market will continue to maintain an upward trend.
In addition to power tools and electric two-wheelers, Qorvo is gradually expanding its BMS products to other applications, such as the passenger car market and the energy storage market.
"Qorvo's BMS chips have a wide input range for a single cell voltage, which can support different types of cells, and will be expanded to lower strings and improve the stackable design of the product in the future on the basis of the existing 10-20 strings. ”
When it comes to entering the energy storage market, the battery network has noticed that with the explosive growth of the energy storage industry, some of the original power battery BMS companies have also switched to energy storage BMS, and the number of BMS companies in the field of cross-border energy storage is also increasing.
"More and more competitors entering the BMS industry is the most concerned issue, will it be said that the market will become a red sea, and finally become a market dominated by price wars. In Zhang Yichi's view, in the field of energy storage, customers obviously put the first priority on the reliability and stability of the product itself, customer demand is no longer a single cell management and protection, there is more demand for connection, data security, intelligence, including the functional safety of the cell, simply to win by price will eventually be eliminated, higher product value is the right direction of BMS development.
At present, with the large-scale construction and application of 100MWh large-scale energy storage power stations and even GWh-level energy storage power stations, in order to achieve efficient management of a large number of energy storage batteries in series and parallel, the technical requirements for BMS are very high, and the subtleties of the battery cells will affect the overall performance life of the system, including economy.
Zhang believes that Qorvo's current wireless product line and sensor product line may be combined with BMS solutions in the future, which can greatly help customers in improving the safety and connectivity of battery packs. The BMS products provided by the company must be valuable, unique and differentiated products, as long as the products can provide the corresponding value, and there is no need to worry about more and more competitors entering this field.
"The energy storage market is an area that every BMS supplier wants to enter, because the market capacity, market trends, and market demand are much higher than other battery applications. "I believe we will soon see Qorvo's progress and results in the field of energy storage." ”
With an eye to the future, Qorvo continues to innovate and break new ground
The battery network understands that at present, BMS mainly realizes communication connection through wire, especially for large-scale battery systems, which require a large number of wiring to complete communication and isolation. However, as battery technology continues to evolve, the cost of wired connections will continue to increase, and the disadvantages of reliability, weight, and assembly difficulty will gradually appear.
As a result, the market is pushing wireless BMS technology into the validation and large-scale application phase.
Zhang Yichi also said that for the traditional chrysanthemum chain battery system, the biggest challenge, the first is the cost of the wiring harness, the large battery system works at the same time, the cost and space occupied by the wiring harness is far greater than imagined; the second is the aging of the wiring harness, especially in some remote and foreign areas with relatively high labor costs, it is also a relatively large burden; the third is the assembly, maintenance and replacement of the wiring harness, which requires human intervention in the process of high voltage safety of the battery pack.
That's why Qorvo is forward-looking in wireless, integrating Bluetooth and other wireless communication modules into the MCU to improve the flexibility and intelligence of the battery management system.
"We expect to see relevant wireless BMS samples later this year. Zhang Yichi emphasized that Qorvo has been deploying wireless products for a long time, and there is no threshold for Qorvo to use BMS's existing SiP architecture for upgrade and iteration.
It is worth noting that although liquid lithium batteries are still the main force in the market application in the development of the industry in recent years, the next-generation battery technology routes such as solid-state batteries, sodium batteries, and vanadium batteries are ushering in a period of rapid growth. At present, semi-solid-state batteries and sodium batteries have gradually entered the stage of commercial application, especially sodium batteries have achieved phased results in product research and development, capacity construction, industrial chain training, customer verification, yield improvement and promotion of demonstration projects.
It is understood that Qorvo has paid full attention to the development direction of other battery technologies such as solid-state batteries and sodium batteries when promoting the BMS business. Zhang Yichi introduced that different battery technology routes may have some changes in materials or structures, but in the end, it is reflected in the battery management system, mainly considering the input voltage of the cells, the protection of the cells, the number of cells and other parameters.
Qorvo's BMS has met the needs of customers in two fundamental ways: first, the wide voltage range of a single cell, and second, the high-precision ADC that provides effective cell monitoring and protection. With these two goals in mind, Qorvo works closely with customers to flexibly adapt their BMS product lines to their product planning needs.
"At this point, there is no natural obstacle to Qorvo's BMS when it comes to switching battery materials. Zhang Yichi said.
Epilogue:
Looking ahead, EVTank expects global lithium-ion battery shipments to reach 1,926.0GWh in 2025 and 5,004.3GWh in 2030.
There are also many difficulties behind the prosperity and development of the lithium battery industry, and there are still very few excellent players in the field of BMS. As Zhang Yichi said, meeting the functional needs of customers is very simple and everyone can do it, but when it comes to the quality and reliability of the product itself, it is necessary to have a long-term verification process for the supplier, including the process of whether the products other than BMS have a good quality reputation in the market, which is actually a more difficult and long-term test.
As a global company with an important position in the semiconductor industry, it will be interesting to see what kind of sparks Qorvo will spark in the future battery field through BMS products.