Apple’s self-developed battery management chip

According to Reuters, the CEO of Dialog Semiconductor, Apple’s iPhone power management chip supplier, said on the conference call that Apple’s orders did decrease, but did not give an explanation for reducing orders. Apple is likely to be developing its own power management chip. Due to the reduction of orders from Apple, Dai Lege’s revenue decreased by 5% in 2018. Although it still maintained a growth trend, but the news was not optimistic that the stock price fell, causing the market value of Dai Lege to shrink by half. Fortunately, the performance of this supplier will not be greatly affected this year. Apple has already signed orders with the company for products in 2019 and 2020. Therefore, it is unlikely that Apple will launch such chips in this year.

Since the end of last year, there have been media reports that Apple is designing its own power management chip to handle tasks such as iPhone charging, battery life management and energy consumption. It is used to replace the power management integrated circuit (PMIC) of Daylok used on existing mobile phones. Designing its own power management chip can better integrate with A-series processors and W wireless chips, which can help Apple further reduce costs and improve battery efficiency, and help Apple to enter the field of virtual reality and augmented reality glasses in the future. Cell phone batteries are energy storage tools that provide power for mobile phones. Actually, they are not just cell phones. All electronic devices require a power supply, but different systems have different power requirements. In order to exert the best performance of the electronic system, it is necessary to select the most suitable power management method. This is achieved through the corresponding power supply chip combined with few external components. It can be seen that developing the power management chip is essential to improve the overall performance.

In an electronic device system, a chip that takes charge of the transformation, distribution, detection, and other power management of electrical energy is a power management chip. It is mainly responsible for identifying the power supply amplitude of the CPU and generating a corresponding short moment wave to promote the subsequent circuit. Power output. The “Battery accident” incident that once pushed Apple to the cusp of last year should be impressed. Although Apple officials have always attributed the reason of automatic black screen shutdown to the objective factors such as the service life of lithium batteries, many viewpoints consider it important to play an important role in this. The role of the battery management chip did not work well and was a mistake in Apple’s iPhone design.

With the enhancement of iPhone hardware performance, both the CPU and the image processor have been greatly accelerated, and the functional modules of the device have become increasingly complicated, which has pushed up the demand for larger input current. Therefore, the power management chip must also develop towards higher integration, higher power density, higher pressure resistance, current resistance, and higher energy efficiency. Modularization is the strongest trend of power management chip technology. Modular power management ICs can effectively reduce system design complexity, save circuit board space, improve system long-term reliability, and can also effectively reduce system costs. The benefits are obvious. The modularization trend is also reflected in the “integration” of other chips on the board. The integration of functions such as communication and monitoring between the power management IC and the main control chip is also increasing. Perhaps based on such development requirements, Apple began to launch a battery management chip R & D program, hoping to use the latest chip technology to maximize solve the “battery accident” problem that has plagued itself for several years. According to previous rumors, Apple has at least 8 patents for battery life. The patent includes ensuring that each part of the mobile phone processor consumes only the minimum power needed, shutting down some processors when the processor is not needed. Therefore, the future iPhone will also have a significant increase in endurance.