The idea behind the smart battery gateway is to provide a flexible smart battery interface that is compatible with ACPI compliant operating systems for the Robin and Woodpecker products. The gateway interfaces with our standard Toradex Award BIOS which provides the host operating system with smart battery support.
The BIOS supports a rich, pre-defined smart battery SM bus compliant communication protocol which the host uses to communicate directly with the smart battery gateway. The smart battery gateway provides two SM bus interfaces; one interface is a dedicated interface with the host controller, and the second interface is used to connect to the smart battery devices which form part of the smart battery solution (e.g. smart battery chargers, smart battery system managers and smart batteries).
The gateway therefore isolates all devices which form the smart battery solution from the host device by physically splitting the SM bus. This has the advantage of increasing robustness of hot plug solutions, when smart battery components may be connected or removed from the SM bus on the fly, whilst providing the flexibility to build a very customized smart battery solution without having to modify the core system BIOS.
The smart battery gateway reference design is built around the Silicon Labs C8051F340 microcontroller. Through customised firmware running on this device, it is possible for system developers to implement smart battery support which is specifically tailored to the requirements of the target application.
Smart Battery Gateway Overview
A reference design guide is freely available for designing the smart battery gateway into your application, and can be downloaded using the following link.
It should be noted that any smart battery imeplementation is dependant upon the requirements of the end application. While the smart battery gateway provides a flexible foundation upon which to build a variety of different solutions, it may not be suitable for all applications. Please study the reference design guide carefully to determine whether the smart battery gateway is suitable for your specific application
The reference design is based around the Silicon Labs C8051F340 microcontroller. The complete project include all required source code for the Silicon Labs IDE can be downloaded from the following link:
The Silicon Labs IDE can be downloaded from the following link:
