Power management IC for battery products
31 Jul 2025
Power Electronics / Power Management
Nordic Semiconductor recently announced its new nPM1304 power management IC (PMIC). Building on the success of the well-established nPM1300, the nPM1304 offers the ideal solution for space-constrained applications that require small batteries. With small batteries come extremely tight energy budgets and demanding requirements on all functionality to operate at the lowest power possible.
The nPM1304 PMIC brings unique system management features and accurate fuel gauging for low-power and size-constrained applications. Nordic’s unique algorithm-based fuel gauge method uses voltage, current, and temperature monitoring, together with a mathematical battery model, to estimate battery state of charge. This method yields an accuracy comparable to that of dedicated fuel gauge devices such as coulomb counters, but without the additional power consumption and inherent error accumulation.
A dedicated fuel gauge device can use as much as 50 µA when the product is active and 7 µA in sleep mode. For a product with, for example, a 200 µA average current consumption, the traditional fuel gauging represents an unsustainable share of the total energy budget. With Nordic’s solution using 8 µA active and zero current in sleep, it provides accurate state-of-charge estimates with no noticeable shortening of battery life.
The nPM1304 charges single-cell Li-ion, Li-poly, and LiFePO4 batteries with a linear charging module that supports from 4 to 100 mA charge current and programmable from 3,5 to 4,65 V termination voltage. The battery charger features automatic thermal regulation with programmable maximum chip temperature during charging.
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