Without proper monitoring, EV batteries are prone to catching fire in applications such as cars, e-scooters and e-bikes. Accurate battery management systems are essential, but most use too much energy to be truly cost-effective and sustainable. A team from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad has turned its research in battery management solutions into a prize-winning start-up. Here, Hyderabad’s Dr Rashi Dutt shares the story.
“Everyone is saying that Electric Vehicles (EVs) are key to solving the problems of energy consumption and carbon emissions. But to be truly sustainable, their batteries – and battery management systems – need to run on low power too.
At their most basic level, battery management systems make the battery safe. They alert the user to over-charging and overheating, cutting the power. Here in India, instead of buying very efficient and accurate systems, the market is flooded with inefficient alternatives that are mostly imported. They are very low-cost, so everyone uses them. In the last 3 years, we have been hearing lots of stories of EVs catching fire because of battery faults.
We are working on a technology that improves the safety, accuracy and reliability of these management systems. It adds features like fault detection and the ability to boost the battery’s lifespan – all while making the systems more sustainable and cost-effective. Arm IP has played a key part in those efforts."
"Our team of researchers and PhD students first encountered the issue when working on an algorithm to solve a signal processing problem.
Battery monitoring is essentially a classical signal processing problem. The only real-time data you can get from a battery is its current and voltage. By processing those signals correctly, you can learn how the battery is behaving. You can understand what charge is remaining, and its status in terms of age and health.
We soon realized our research had a lot of potential in the real world if we could bring extra quality and accuracy to battery management systems, and ensure they use less energy.
“Arm could help us meet our goals much better than any other company. Its cores are very low power, area-efficient and low complexity. They offer very small form factor and very low carbon emissions.”
The technology was there, we had our algorithm and the design architecture. The question was how to deliver it.
We knew that hardware was the way to go. It’s much more efficient than software in its energy consumption. But chip development quickly became a major technical hurdle. We needed our chip to be as low power as possible.
We started off working with RISC-V architecture. We managed to develop the technology, but we did not get much support to carry the design forward. We then tried a general-purpose processor as well as Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) solution. FPGA is very good for validating research, but it requires a lot of resource, so it’s not a good candidate for a real-world product.
Arm, however, was the perfect solution. It could help us meet our goals much better than any other company. Arm’s cores are very low power, area-efficient and low complexity. They offer very small form factor and very low carbon emissions."
"We published our research in 2021 and we got some traction. India does not produce batteries or battery management systems, yet both are vitally important here. As well as keeping batteries safe, accurate monitoring can reduce charging or range anxiety. Drivers’ fear that they cannot trust how well their car has charged, which affects consumer confidence in EV technology.
We wanted our research work to be useful for the real world, which means we had to bring it to the market. So, in 2022 we launched our own start-up, SmartKosh Technologies.
The Indian government may have been keen to make battery monitoring technology indigenous to the country, but was the market ready? Entering the market would give us validation beyond the lab. It meant meeting people and gaining an understanding of the demand.
It had also become very challenging to validate the new technology at the desired scale in the lab. We could have small batteries, but could not see how they would perform in real time, in an application.
As a start-up in India, you can get initial funding for product development if you have an innovative idea. We could use that money to pay for our market research.
“It was not just the IP that Arm provided. The SoC Labs team helped us out at every stage, and we are now much more confident about our technology…Having Arm behind us helped people see why they should choose our design and helped accelerate our product development.”
We approached Arm to help us develop our innovation further. We had found out about Arm Academic Access, a free program to enable universities and research institutes undertaking non-commercial research, training and education to access packages of Arm IP on an ongoing basis. It allowed us to get hold of the IP we could not get with the RISC-V architecture and help us develop our theoretical ideas. At a later stage, once we decided to spin off from the University and create a startup, Arm Flexible Access for Startups was the right Arm program to support us. It provided free access to Arm technology, including IP, tools and training, with license fees only due at tape out. The Academic Access team were very helpful in helping us make the transition from accessing IP to support our academic research to doing it through a commercial framework designed to help early-stage startups in their product development. Both the Arm Academic Access program and Arm Flexible Access for Startups share the same set of IP, so the transition was easy. The commercial access to Arm IP also stayed free of charge during the prototyping phase.
This year, we also took part in the Arm Flexible Access for Startups contest. We proposed the idea of an AI-powered battery chemistry-agnostic System on Chip (SoC).
Arm liked our idea. We ended up as the runner-up and were rewarded with $150k of Arm technology credit and comprehensive technical feedback through an Arm Design Review. Since the contest was help in partnership with Silicon Catalyst, we also received a pitch review hosted by the Silicon Catalyst Angel Investment Group as part of the prize.
That was so important as a validation of our work. Having Arm behind us helped people see why they should choose our design. Arm Academic Access also helped accelerate our product development through putting us in touch with SoC Labs, the global academic community for Arm-based projects around software and hardware development. It was not just about providing IP. The SoC Labs team supported us at every stage of our project, and we are now much more confident about our technology."
"These contests are a big part of the development process. In 2003, we were selected for the Royal Academy Leadership in Innovation Fellowship Global, which helps researchers to understand the market potential and commercialize their technology. I pitched our idea to many people in UK, including in Oxford and Cambridge. We got a lot of positive feedback.
IIT Hyderabad are also participating in this year’s SoC Labs design contest for mixed signal design. This was another big opportunity for us.
We are digital design engineers, and we are very experienced there. But the product requires the digital system to interact with real-world analog signals. We need take the data from the signal, using sensors on the chip. We convert that data for processing, run the processing and send the data back to the real world in real time. That’s the challenge. And that’s how we came into contact with SoC Labs mixed signal design contest whose contest is specifically about combining these mixed signals."
"Today, most EVs use lithium-ion batteries. Many other technologies are being explored including sodium, Li-Sulfur and solid-state batteries, as well as hydrogen fuel cells. All require the same accurate monitoring. Our concept started gaining real traction when we could make our system battery chemistry agnostic. That got a really positive response. And in January this year, it secured SmartKosh its first grant of £25,000, to develop the proof of concept for the battery management system. This felt like a breakthrough.
The experience of spinning our research out into a start-up has been a little challenging, as there are not many people in our institution who have done it before. But along the way we have got a lot of help, including from Arm. Their team has been very good and very generous with its time.
We have seen how the process can be streamlined, and how we can do it. We are still navigating the many challenges ahead of us, but we are now much more confident in what we can do."
Dr Rashi Dutt is a researcher at IIT Hyderabad and Founder of SmartKosh Technologies.
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