Zilog announces MCU based battery charging reference design

USA & SWITZERLAND: Zilog, a wholly-owned subsidiary of IXYS Corp. and a pioneer supplier of application-specific, embedded microcontroller (MCU) system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for industrial and consumer power management applications, is introducing its new Buck Converter Battery Charger Reference Design that employs Zilog’s Z8F042A MCU to control a step-down DC-DC converter (also known as a buck converter) that acts as a regulated power source.

This buck converter battery charger hardware is capable of regulating charger output in a number of modes, such as constant voltage or constant current with set current limits. The charger can be viewed as a complete control system. The type and capacity of the battery determines the mode of operation of the battery controller.

The voltage and current set points are also determined by the type and capacity of the battery. All battery control loop operations can be controlled by the user via the Z8F042A MCU’s UART block and feedback is provided in the HyperTerminal console. Additionally, LEDs provide a visual status of the charging process.

This low-cost reference design demonstrates a lithium ion battery charger consisting of a Z8F042A MCU and a buck converter. The charging process utilizes the highly accurate ADC peripheral and alternates between current and voltage monitoring which is controlled in the background software routine, allowing for the UART to be processed in the main function.

With the provided hyper terminal GUI, the user can enter desired set-voltages and set-currents. A proportional/integral (PI) control loop is used to charge the battery and to monitor the battery voltage after the charging process is completed. To save memory resources, the provided UART does not implement the STDIO.H libraries. Instead, a simple UART using only integer values is used.