Hello and welcome to AVR TV. Lithium ion batteries are popular in consumer applications like cell-phones, cameras, notebooks and portable media players because of their high energy density. But Lithium ion batteries need special care and caution and there are several aspects to them that benefit from proper electronic control, for instance protection against over heating and short circuits to prevent fire and explosions, good control of charging and discharging it which makes it possible to store more energy in the battery and consequently get more energy out of it before the next recharge. Secure authentication increases safety further by enabling discrimination of unsafe copycat batteries and adding conveniences like history of use and gas gauging that helps maintain the interest of the vendor as well as the customer.

The ATMega 406 has been an important player in the high end of this market and now we are also launching the HVA, HVB and HVD parts to the market. And Product Marketing Director Addison Hensley can you tell us a little bit more about this product? Sure we use smart battery parts the HVA, HVB and HVD series, combine very high analog performance with extremely low power and of course ease of use. Good analog circuitry and a generally a very high performance of the AVR CPU not only ensures proper battery protection, it also allows users to create a highest performing battery with shortest development time. As an example of the impact of high analog performance consider this voltage control with an absolute accuracy of +- 12.5 mV over the entire temperature and voltage range allows more than 95% of the battery’s energy to be safely used. Producing that accuracy to +- 100mV means only about 70% can be safely used. This is one the key strengths of smart battery microcontrollers. In addition the coulombs counter of the HVA and HVB devices provide accurate control of the battery's charged state, this is called gas-gauging and allows good estimates over remain in battery time and early warning persistence that needs to perform safe shut down to store user data etc. And now the current Atmels's smart battery road map look like this , on the top right you will find the parts for high end applications with 3 to 4 lithium ion cells requiring gas-gauging like PC batteries etc. This is where the ATmega406 already exists and now we have also added the 16k and 32k HVB parts. The midrange are the mega8HVA and mega16HVA parts for a one to two cell applications like camcorders, digital still cameras, PDA’s and smart phones, all requiring gas-gauging. And to bottom left are mega4HVD and mega8HVD targeted for simpler applications like low end digital still cameras, cell phones, handheld GPS units and media players that don’t require gas gauging but need battery protection and authentication.

High performance MCUs like the AVR allows the user to implement high security authentication algorithms to record battery use history, be flexible with battery parameters etc. And of course feel sure that the onboard battery supervisor is the least power consuming MCU on the planet. To ease development we have prepared reference designs for all who want to for sell lithium ion battery consolations and these reference designs called SB 201, SB 202 etc are plugged into this sb200 smart battery demonstration kit. And this motherboard can then charge and discharge batteries, communicate with a host pc, and there are still separate AVR TV episodes for it which user should check out. And that is all of we had for this episode of AVR TV so stay tuned and see you next time.