It’s become part of the lore lithium battery packof science and engineering that an inventor will barely beat out a competitor at the door of the patent office, or a scientist will publish a paper just days before a distant colleague. While some hypothesize that skullduggery was behind the photo-finish (such as this book about Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone patent, or Darwin rushing to publish after seeing Wallace’s rough draft) it’s still clear that when there is an obvious problem or puzzle to solve, bright minds will search for a solution and come up with similar results. An obvious problem just begs for a solution.
So why aren’t there more lithium ion battery pack fuel gauges being introduced? While many IC companies offer the coulomb-counting type of gauge, coulomb-counting technology has some serious negatives: It’s not as accurate as you’d like, and it often requires a learning cycle of charging and recharging the battery cell(s) as part of the production process which adds cost. On the plus side, the coulomb-counting gauges are simple and inexpensive.
