Improving Battery Management System Performance and Cost with Altera FPGAs

The purpose of this white paper is to evaluate improvements to Battery Management System (BMS) performance and cost with Altera® FPGAs. In many high-voltage battery systems, including electric vehicles, grid attached storage and industrial applications, the battery is a significant portion of the system cost, and needs to be carefully managed by a BMS to maximize battery life and to optimize charging and discharging performance. This white paper presents the BMS functional requirements for these applications and outlines existing BMS architectures. Key BMS architectural challenges are discussed and opportunities for Altera devices are identified. For each of these opportunities, the performance and cost of the existing solution are compared with Altera FPGA solutions. Altera devices provide architectural flexibility, scalability, customization, performance improvements, and system cost savings in BMS applications.