FPGA Accelerator for Battery Management Systems in Safety-Critical Applications

Lithium-Ion batteries are becoming the standard solution as power source for electrical vehicles, but the increasing request of autonomous driving capability imposes stringent safety requirements and asks to fulfil ever growing constraints to achieve the safety specifications. Several considerations must be done about the Safe Operating Area of a battery, that means maintaining the correct levels of voltage, temperature and current, as well as avoiding main power cuts due to system faults. This article proposes an FPGA implementation of a Triple Module Redundancy extension for a conventional BMS. The design of the hardware accelerator is described, the testing set-up is introduced and the results of the experimental validation process are discussed. The FPGA accelerator successfully demonstrates the full functionality and the advantages achievable by its introduction in the Battery Management System (BMS) architecture.