It is common for many battery-powered devices to require a wide variety of charging sources, battery chemistries, voltages, and currents. For example, industrial, medical, and automotive battery charger circuits demand higher voltages and currents as newer large-battery packs are emerging for all types of battery chemistries.

Current integrated circuit (IC)-based solutions cover just a fraction of the many possible combinations of input voltage, charge voltage, and charge current. A cumbersome combination of ICs and discrete components has routinely been used to cover most of the remaining, more difficult combinations and topologies. Now some simpler, more compact, monolithic solutions are available to solve these problems.

Analog Devices’ full-featured battery charging and PowerPath™ manager ICs, the LTC4162 and LTC4015, simplify a very difficult high voltage and high current charging system. These devices efficiently manage power distribution between input sources, such as wall adapters, backplanes, solar panels, etc., and the charging of various battery chemistries, including Li-Ion/polymer, LiFePO4, and SLA. Their simple solution and compact footprints enable them to achieve high performance in leading-edge applications where only more complicated, older technology switching regulator-based topologies such as SEPIC were once the only option.