Revolutionizing Industrial Energy Storage: Exploring the Four Key Technical Advantages of Gigadevice’s Fully Autonomous BMS Solution

From chips to fully autonomous systems! This article analyzes the four key technological advantages of GigaDevice’s commercial energy storage BMS solution. As the “dual carbon” goals accelerate, commercial energy storage is experiencing explosive growth as a core application area for electrochemical energy storage. According to relevant statistics, between January and October 2024, nearly 950 new grid-connected commercial energy storage projects were added in China, with a total capacity of 2.37 GW/5.31 GWh. With the deepening of peak and valley electricity pricing mechanisms, rising emergency power demands, and increasing pressure for renewable energy consumption, energy storage systems are rapidly penetrating industrial parks, data centers, and other scenarios, becoming an essential component of modern power systems. However, the inherent risk of thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries, combined with the technical complexity of coordinating multiple devices like battery clusters and BMS, poses significant challenges for safe and reliable operation in the industry.

In response to the urgent demand for safety solutions, Mao Mingge, product marketing manager at GigaDevice, recently delivered a presentation on “The Commercial Energy Storage BMS Solution Based on GD Next-Generation MCUs.” This solution was co-developed by GigaDevice and Shenzhen Zhongdian Port Technology Co., Ltd., utilizing the GD32F527, GD32VW553, and GD32C113 series MCUs from GigaDevice. The presentation focused on optimizing hardware design and safety mechanisms, proposing a safety solution that combines technological foresight with practical engineering applications, providing new ideas to address industry pain points.

The BMS solution features a robust and flexible architecture with a comprehensive three-tier system design. The BMU component utilizes the GD32C113, while the BCU component employs the GD32F527, integrating the GD32VW53 wireless communication module. Mao highlighted that the solution provides a standardized development foundation, enabling rapid secondary development by customers and reducing the development cycle by nearly six months compared to traditional models. This solution is adaptable to various voltage applications and supports remote monitoring of device status through its wireless communication module. The main control chip, GD32F527, includes a display interface that directly presents core information such as cell voltage and current, allowing maintenance personnel to easily understand system status without additional external devices.

On the communication front, the solution is equipped with a range of interfaces, supporting CAN and Ethernet connections in multi-machine parallel scenarios, accommodating networking needs for systems of different scales.

In terms of functionality, the solution includes smoke, gas, and pressure detection for safety protection. It integrates environmental sensors that can monitor abnormal conditions like smoke in real-time. The accompanying efficient management platform features state monitoring and data analysis capabilities, supporting data exchange via CAN and Ethernet, thereby providing multiple layers of safety assurance for system operations. Mao emphasized that the entire solution boasts four key technological advantages: firstly, the BMS solution supports automatic addressing technology, eliminating the need for traditional DIP switches. This not only saves hardware costs but also prevents system addressing failures caused by aging switches. Secondly, it implements intelligent battery balancing management, collecting voltage and current information from each battery cell to automatically adjust charging and discharging states based on preset balancing strategies. Notably, the balancing current for a single battery cell can reach 150 mA, achieving efficient energy balancing.

The third advantage is its flexible expansion architecture. The solution can seamlessly switch between secondary and tertiary architectures, allowing for customizable configurations of BCU and BMU device quantities, with a single BCU capable of connecting to up to 16 BMUs, fully meeting the practical application needs of 1500V systems. In terms of upgrading, the solution supports both cloud and local upgrade modes, with cloud upgrades requiring no on-site manual operation, greatly improving operational convenience.

Regarding safety and reliability, this commercial energy storage BMS solution features a multi-level fault protection mechanism capable of supporting over 20 graded fault protections. Data storage utilizes both local and cloud mechanisms, with local storage retaining data for a week and cloud storage providing long-term historical data for battery cells, facilitating subsequent big data analysis. The solution also supports multi-relay stickiness detection. Mao stressed that relay stickiness, a long-term fault, could lead to sustained power supply or failure to shut down, potentially causing major accidents. This detection function can provide real-time warnings of such risks. Additionally, the solution includes a high-voltage interlock feature, ensuring that high-voltage systems do not start in unsafe conditions or when connections are incomplete.

Mao stated that the entire solution is developed based on GigaDevice’s GD32 MCU, with core IP being fully autonomous and produced using domestic supply chains, including selecting domestic brands for edge components, ensuring autonomy and controllability from chips to systems. To ensure the reliability of the solution’s performance, GigaDevice has conducted multi-dimensional testing and verification covering key projects such as overcurrent, short circuit, parallel operation, ESD, and EMC. For example, in short circuit testing, the team fully simulated real application scenarios, ensuring that all protection functions can respond within microsecond-level response times to swiftly address abnormal conditions.

The solution is widely applicable across various fields, including photovoltaic storage, communication bases, home storage, portable storage, vehicle-mounted storage, and UPS systems. Regardless of the scale of the system, it can achieve efficient applications through flexible adaptations of its multi-tier architecture.

The core chip empowers various application scenarios. The GD32F527 serves as the heart of the solution and is a new generation of core chip in GigaDevice’s high-performance product line. Compared to previous products, its 1MB SRAM and 7.5MB Flash memory configuration are particularly suitable for applications with large code volumes or complex algorithms. The chip integrates abundant peripheral resources, including two CAN-FD interfaces, fully meeting communication protocol requirements in the BMS industry, and features a display expansion interface to directly meet the multi-page display needs of energy storage devices. In traditional solutions, displays often require external PSRAM; however, the 1MB on-chip SRAM of the GD32F527 is sufficient to support the simultaneous operation of monitoring data and display interfaces, saving customers the costs and space associated with external storage chips. In terms of reliability design, this chip employs enhanced ESD protection schemes that not only meet general ESD requirements in industrial and energy fields but also address the rigorous radiation-type ESD challenges in power scenarios. Notably, the GD32F527 has passed the IEC 61508 functional safety certification, and GigaDevice’s safety engineering team can assist customers in embedding the STL software library into the main code. Based on empirical studies, this support can save customers 60% to 70% of the functional safety certification development time. Additionally, the chip offers various packaging options for flexible adaptation to different terminal device forms.

The GD32VW553 is another core component, integrating a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth LE 5.2 dual-frequency module. It not only provides advanced baseband and RF performance but also includes 4MB Flash and 320KB SRAM. After completing protocol layer development, customers can still free up about 200KB of SRAM space for custom functions. Recognizing that customers in the energy and industrial sectors typically prefer module solutions, GigaDevice offers both chip-level and module-level delivery options. They have constructed an energy monitoring communication solution based on these two chips, employing a layered collaborative architecture: the GD32F527 communicates with the Wi-Fi module via AT commands, with the module hosting the protocol layer’s pass-through and connection functions, while the GD32F527 focuses on running application layer logic. This design allows customers to meet expansion needs for USB, Ethernet, and other interfaces without additional adaptations for other Wi-Fi modules. Furthermore, once the application layer interface is standardized, module selection is no longer limited to a single supplier, significantly enhancing compatibility and flexibility.

In conclusion, Mao summarized that this commercial energy storage BMS solution aims to tackle all challenges encountered in energy storage system operations. From hardware architecture to software algorithm construction, it establishes a multi-layer protection system to ensure the safe and stable operation of energy storage devices throughout their lifecycle.