If you have a PDA, MP3, MP4, Laptop, Cell Phone, Smartphone, DVD players, or other electronic device then more likely then not the battery within your device is a high capacity smart battery pack. What is a high capacity smart battery pack? A high capacity smart battery pack is a complex battery system designed to power high tech electronic devices.

What differentiates smart batteries from standard batteries is the specialized hardware that provides calculated on demand current as well as predicted information.

This specialized hardware includes:


The connector
The fuse
The charge and discharge FETs
The cell pack
The sense resistor (RSENSE)
The primary and secondary protection ICs
The fuel-gauge IC
The thermistor
The pc board
The EEPROM or firmware for the fuel-gauge IC

In addition to the above advanced chip components, I mentioned that information flows from these components to another advanced component of the smart battery and that is the smart battery’s System Management Bus (SMBus) control - a two-wire interface through which simple power-related chips can communicate with rest of the system. Typically a SMBus uses I2C as its backbone so that multiple chips can be connected to the bus. The SMBus allows a device to transfer manufacturer information, transfers model or part number to and from the device and battery, save its state for a suspend event, report different types of errors, accept control parameters and return its status.

All in all the smart battery is a highly specialized battery that functions within its intended design. Used outside its design the smart battery really won’t work too well!