Feature: Batteries
Figure 1: Does a smart cell mean a more complex battery?
Adding intelligence to high-voltage battery packs
By Joel Sylvester, Chief Technology Officer, Dukosi B
attery technology is continuing to evolve, but it’s under intense pressure. Diverse competition has pushed battery designers and operators across all
sectors – from electric and electrified vehicles (xEVs) to energy storage and industrial applications – to deliver ever greater performance, safety, reliability and sustainability, whilst keeping costs and complexities down and meeting regulatory compliance. It is quickly becoming clear that traditional battery architectures are struggling to meet the demands of modern high-voltage applications.
Performance, safety and manufacturability High-voltage battery packs must deliver the highest possible energy density with effective thermal management. Tey must provide robust safety and accurate state-of- charge (SoC) and health (SoH) estimation – yet all of this at reduced component
28 June 2026
www.electronicsworld.co.uk
count, cost, volume (thus, weight) and a greater ease of assembly. Ideally the same battery pack should be
usable across many platforms; however, it is their optimisation for each specific design that creates a tension between modularity, scalability and application- specific performance. Challenges also extend into battery
operation and management. Operators increasingly expect batteries to have lifecycle intelligence, capable of identifying faults during service and providing tracing from manufacturing to recycling. Regulatory frameworks are adding to this pressure even further. One example is the EU Battery Regulation, which mandates digital battery passports for batteries over 2kWh. Meeting these complex tasks requires
persistent, granular information at the pack as well as cell level. Tis ensures that provenance, usage history and SoH are verifiable throughout the battery’s operational life and into any second-life
application, even if its individual cells that are being reused. Conventional, wired architectures that
route sensor measurements to the module or pack level can’t deliver that granularity of information. A solution is to move away from module-level monitoring to richer, more accurate cell-level insight, something that is not fully achievable with wired systems. In terms of far-field wireless approaches,
they may reduce wiring, volume, weight and potential points of failure, but oſten struggle with data latency, signal interference and reliability, especially in dense, high-voltage environments. Tis juxtaposition between what battery
designers and operators need and what conventional architectures can deliver calls for specialised solutions. Ultimately, it leads to “smart cells”, where intelligence is present at the cell level. Tis, however, is also a challenge, since data from every cell must be communicated to the battery management system (BMS) processor accurately and efficiently, in real time.
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