Smart Battery Pack
A new type of battery pack, a smart battery pack, provides the device with information about its power status so that the device can conserve power intelligently. Smart battery packs can include many addition features and functionality such as fuel gauge integration, SMBus communication protocol, cell balancing and protection circuitry.
The SMBus protocol architecture provides a means for keeping hardware costs low while also providing flexible functionality in a modular way. SMBus is a protocol that allows multiple nodes to respond to unique addresses. Details and specifications for SMBus can be found at www.smbus.org.
A smart battery can manage its own charging, report errors, inform the device of low-charge conditions, predict remaining run-time, provide temperate, voltage and current information and continuously self-correct to maintain prediction accuracy.