Host emulator for next generation battery chargers

A modern portable computer, netbook, smartphone or camera is powered by a smart battery. This is a device containing one or more Lithium cells, protection circuits and a power management circuit, interfaced by a two wire SMBus interface [1]. The need for higher efficiency and longer battery life has pushed the technology of the smart battery forward, for higher efficiency, smaller component count and more integrated functions controlled by internal registers. The internal registers are written and read via SMBus. A charger is evaluated by the test engineers and presented to the customers by the field application engineers on a demonstrator board which emulates the conditions found in a real system. The charger also needs a SMBus Master [2]. This paper presents a host emulator integrated in the demonstrator board, together with a Windows interface for accessing the internal registers.