Electric vehicles (EV) are unquestionably the future of mobility, with numerous initiatives to accelerate its adoption. Nonetheless, technical gaps still exist on EV usage – several of them relating to battery capacity, cost, performance and safety concerns, which create several barriers for EV wider market uptake. Battery Management Systems (BMS) have been playing a key role in optimising the use of continuously larger battery stacks with improved endurance, performance and reliability, typically representing around 15% of the overall battery cost. Therefore, reducing their cost and improving their performance is key to minimising battery-related bottlenecks for wide EV adoption.

LiBAL has developed a novel Integrated Circuit for Advanced Battery Management (ICAB). ICAB is an ASIC-based integrated circuit to be deployed as a local monitoring unit within large BMS. ICAB offers several disruptive features, including:

1. an unmatched cost per monitored lithium cell (>50% lower than alternatives from major manufacturers);
2. more efficient energy balancing across cells in the battery pack without ramping overall costs, through a unique, patent-protected hybrid balancing method and;
3. reduction in the complexity of master/slave communication wiring through powerline communications.

To bridge the remaining steps towards full scale commercialisation of ICAB, LiBAL has not only to widely demonstrate it in full scale but also to consolidate our strategic partnering throughout the EV value chain to ensure enough support for ICAB’s production ramp-up. The to-market maturation of ICAB within the present innovation project represents a strategic opportunity yielding a very large business potential – opening a potential revenue stream summing up to over €325 m over the five years post market introduction, from which LiBAL stands to capture over €63 m as additional gross profits, while creating over 50 new positions at the company.