Is this only pertinent to cars or could it be useful on bikes?
http://www.eetimes.de/en/new-ic-reduces-battery-management-system-costs-by-80-percent-in-hybrid-and-electric-vehicles.html?cmp_id=7&news_id=222903111&vID=209
Good find, based on a 3 minute read of the article and very brief check of datasheets... I do believe this would be quite useful to our applications - a single IC will monitor, collect voltage info from 12 cells and using their SMBus isolated with capacitors they claim daisy chain capability up to 31 MAX11068's for 372 cells maximum.
Since each unit is isolated and appears to operate from an extremely wide voltage range (6-72v with transient ability to 80v) that should me so long as each cell group of 12 doesn't exceed the 72v mark (is there even a chemistry which could cause this in single cell form). Actually now that I think of it 12 * 6v (SLA AGM or GEL) = 72v nominal and up to 80v so these could even be used in theory to moniter 6 cell SLA batteries.
Apparently they also support i2c bus interface and with a cost of 8.00 per IC, minimal support components it should make a 24S (really do we need more) BMS possible on the cost factor of about 45.00 for a finished product (assuming you have the PCBs made cheaply or do them in house).
For a 12 cell BMS a single IC could handle that, with temperature safety cutouts (onboard the chip) and all
Hope that answers your basic questions - I have already emailed my Maxim rep to request 4 or 5 samples of the chip be sent out to me for testing and review.
Any idea of lead time? Digikey shows only the development kit, not the chip, and it is non-stock, min qty 2 (wtf?) for $100 ea. It is 4 layer, hopefully that is not mandatory for use of the chip.
Resistive equalization seems doable but tricky. The number of allowed active shunts depends on internal power dissipation, and enabling adjacent cells doubles the internal FET current.
