New Industry Products

LTC Presents LTC4150 Battery Gas Gauge

October 13, 2003 by Jeff Shepard

Linear Technology Corp. (LTC, Milpitas, CA) introduced the LTC4150, a bi-directional, Coulomb counter designed to accurately measure battery capacity in hand-held PC and portable product applications. The device monitors the current through a small sense resistor between the battery and its load or charger circuit. The LTC4150 indicates the charge and discharge of the battery through a series of output pulses over a single communication pin that can be counted by a microcontroller. This allows PDAs, cellular telephones and similar products to monitor the state of battery charge or depletion. It supports one-cell or two-cell lithium-ion, and three-cell to six-cell nickel-cadmium or nickel-metal hydride batteries.

Requiring only an external sense resistor and a filter capacitor, the LTC4150 in the 10-pin MSOP package provides a compact and simple way to monitor battery charge activity. The device provides a series of output pulses and a polarity signal to the microcontroller. The system can then count down from the fully charged state and estimate the battery's remaining capacity at any time during the charging or discharging of the battery.

The LTC4150 is offered in the MSOP-10 package. Pricing starts at $1.50 each for 1,000-piece quantities.