Writing drivers for graphite & silicon
Engineering teams select and qualify batteries, product line owners pay for them, and users are carrying them around - so we may as well use the damn things to their full potential.
But without software, it’s an impossible ambition. It’s akin to buying the latest and greatest consumer GPU and expecting to yield all of the frames the hardware is capable of, without installing an NVIDIA driver. There’s a rapidly growing understanding in our industry, too, that batteries are naked without their software. That they cannot yield or accept all of the energy the material system is capable of, cycle after cycle and year after year, without their drivers. That without software, batteries are an expensive, volume-consuming and mass-contributing line item on the bill of materials that is underwhelming end-users and contributing nothing much to brand differentiation.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a flat black pouch, a blue cylinder, a grey rectangular prism or another combination of colour and battery form factor. The dynamics around us - increasing customer expectations plus intensifying competition - call for the same levels of protection and control of the electrochemical stack that software provides the semiconductor.
So whether one takes an external view and considers it to be in service of users, or an internal one and considers it to be in pursuit of sustainable profit margins, it just makes sense to bring batteries to life with software. And when we do, the result is as beautiful as it is empowering for both end-users and brands alike.
Battery tuning
When batteries are brought to life with software, they become more malleable. More tuneable and adjustable to unique product targets and differing market segments, like a formula race car is highly adjustable to the wide array of circuits it encounters.
Battery design software affords the ability to quickly re-design battery cells, simulating the thermodynamics, the kinetics and the evolution of them with degradation, in response to parametric sweeps through hundreds of design variables in just hours. It’s the magic of software, too, that allows one to forecast a battery’s degradation for a user population, to explore edge cases, to experience today what those users will experience in five and ten years from now, and to produce an optimal battery cell and system design with this foresight. It blurs the line between engineer and oracle, in the way that CAD, FEA and CFD have done so effectively in other engineering fields. It creates a setup where engineering teams can rapidly explore and identify global minima and maxima in a large optimisation landscape. A setup that shifts the use of heavyweight empirical testing from concept exploration to the validation of simulated results. This all translates to compression of the time and cost required to develop products - key for every organisation, and not least those in automotive, where there’s a requirement to shed 25 months, or 45%, off the status quo. It translates into more effective cell manufacturer collaboration, too.
Battery simulation and control software plays its own role, creating the insights and options to select between different, optimal operating points for battery usage and control, and keeping the battery at that optimal point throughout its life. This can take many forms in practice; a Pareto front of charging speed vs. capacity fade, allowing product managers to rapidly adjust the balance of charging performance vs. durability late in development programmes or between product SKUs, always operating at the hardware performance frontier. Or simulation of the effects of voltage window sizing on the balance of energy capacity (delivering runtime, playtime and range) vs. swelling budget consumption and cycle life. Or dynamic evolution of the charging strategy in a continuous, model-based way as the degradation pathway evolves uniquely for every individual user in a population of customers.
Change is all around us
To realise all of these gains, cell design, simulation and control software can’t be like in the decades past. We can’t advance our world at a rate that satisfies our dreams for enhanced quality of life if we continue using legacy tools like it’s 2005. Of course the same applies at the microeconomic level and below as it does at the macro level; individual organisations and the teams fighting for their success must wield the most powerful tools. Age of Empires was prescient – advance your civilisation, or perish at the hands of the competition.
Cell design and simulation software can’t be parameterised only with literature values and rely on the experimental work of researchers in academic labs for high-volume software production. That software can’t be content with only loosely indicating cell development directions and excuse itself from assigning any real meaning to internal states. That doesn’t pass muster when the product line comes knocking on the door of the engineering department for total confidence at the start of production. The software must be inexpensively parameterised for real, relevant batteries on timelines that are so fast they accelerate time-to-market for new product programmes. It must quantitatively answer engineering questions at the wide range of altitudes required across different teams in serious organisations that care more about shipping the greatest product with sustainable profit margins than anything else. And it must do this with great quality, via industrialisation and process-driven laboratory workflows capable of operating at scale.
With this, cell design and simulation software can accelerate the cell to system scale-up process, the battery-to-product integration process – and do so with a retention of cell performance that’s wholly unlike the past decades of excessive battery throttling and derating that have curbed user experiences worldwide.
This changing environment also means battery control software that goes beyond the control of the proxy values of terminal voltage, surface temperature and applied current. Instead, bringing batteries and brands to life means employing battery control software that observes, cares for and directly manages the things that truly matter; the electrochemistry that’s taking place inside the battery, including active management of electrode potentials, internal temperature, stress gradients, utilisation windows of key materials including silicon, and more. Modernity is a battery model running in real-time, locally and embedded in the product, to ensure successful battery utilisation. Realism is achieving it with a battery model that’s been specially designed from the ground-up to be so computationally innocuous that it’s as easily integrated into a pair of headphones as it is into a laptop, smartphones or a Volvo ES90.
As software and the hard labour of intelligent people the world over help battery-powered products to become more optimal, wealth creation isn’t limited to revenue on higher sales volumes and fatter gross margins. Software-driven battery engineering workflows are today helping more than the product, and are enhancing operational efficiencies to drive up net margins, too. People and organisations are experiencing reduced engineering risk by creating visibility of system-level battery performance far earlier in development programmes. Less risk translates into time-averaged improvements to the company top line. Battery and product innovation is being accelerated, resulting not only in better product, but in even further reduced risk of delays to the launch timeline. More is completed for less investment, and the engineering teams are celebrated for their increasing productivity.
100 years pioneering audio
In 1925 Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen founded Bang & Olufsen in Struer, Denmark. Now in 2025 - a century forwards in time - and software and batteries co-exist in a way that brings many new possibilities to the table. This is the time of software-defined batteries and battery design automation. And Bang & Olufsen know it.
One of the world’s greatest brands, with a time-proven approach to engineering excellence that’s reflected in incredible battery-powered products and adoring customers worldwide. This week, the company I’ve been building since 2019, Breathe, announced a battery technology partnership with Bang & Olufsen. It’s an exciting time for batteries, for audiophiles, and for humans everywhere.