Welcome to the World of Software-defined Everything

The best way to start a bar fight in a college town is to ask who’s more important: Electric or electronic engineers. (Read on, the answer is obvious.)

Historically, the distinction goes: Electric engineers harness electrons to move, heat, or light something. Electronic engineers juggle electrons to manage information.

Or, put it another way: If you touch it and it kills you, an electric engineer did it. Electronics engineering, on the other hand, is a more subtle art — if you touch it, it'll never work again. And you’ll never know why.

These definitions worked in simpler times: Electric engineers created the energy journey from power plants, through transformers, power lines, and house wiring, all the way to your toaster. Meanwhile, electronic engineers gave us things like transistor radios, telephones, and the VCR (that always ate your favorite Tom & Jerry cartoon tape.)

Today, the line is much fuzzier. 

For example, power electronics are firmly in the realm of, well, electronic engineering. But it’s about creating voltages and currents to deliver power, not about managing information.

Plus, the plot thickens. There’s a new kid on the block — the software engineer. Software is part of every technological innovation, and very much so in electronics. Software is used to create products, but it is also *in* products.

For instance, engineers use sophisticated CAD software to design components or entire products, from mechanical assemblies to silicon chips and circuit board layouts. Without these advanced tools, very few products we rely on today could have been created. 

Meanwhile, industrial machines are almost always computer-controlled to achieve faster, safer, and more efficient use of limited resources such as labor, time, and raw materials. They can also make intricate parts no craftsman could achieve. 

Computer Numerical Control (CNC) software controls the physical movements of factory tools and machinery whereas before a trained worker would turn dials. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software supervises machines, runs water treatment plants, controls traffic flows, and handles various industrial processes.

Software and hardware are joined at the hips.

Look no further than the smartphone in your pocket. It’s a hunk of complex software. In fact, any processes that involve radio signals (aka, what makes a wireless phone wireless) take place in the software. 

A digital TV, Wifi device, HD radio, or GPS device is nothing more than a computer that turns information it plucks from the air into a format we can consume. The lion’s share of the job is doing complex math with a ton of computing power packed in a tiny chip. Calculations, done at unfathomable rates, fish tiny-teeny whisper out of the cacophony of signals that surround it.

In radio (specifically, the “wireless” bit,) software is such a massive game changer that Software-Defined Radio has its own acronym: SDR.

Thanks to the massive processing power that can do a lot of math, SDR provides much better throughput, sensitivity, interference resistance, and flexibility. No wonder 99% of all new radios of any kind are now SDRs.

But the most important reason for the rise of SDR is that it allows companies to maximize the use of a limited resource: the radio spectrum. 

Here’s what goes on behind the TV screen: The FCC in the US shooed TV broadcasters out of the 600MHz band and sold it for ungodly amounts of money to the wireless carriers. The 600MHz band netted the government a cool $20B and allows wireless companies to deploy their 5G networks to support millions of active users viewing TikTok simultaneously. 

The moral of the story

So what do all of these got to do with battery and energy management solutions?

Hardware will become software-defined because nobody can afford to waste limited resources, including lithium, which is the essential ingredient of practically all batteries. It’s a finite and expensive resource that also carries social and environmental impacts.

Batteries are expensive and volatile. Using today’s battery management systems (BMSs) for high-tech, sophisticated equipment is like putting a circuit breaker from the 1960s into SpaceX.

—> Most of today’s BMSs are archaic. It’s time to put software in batteries to make them safer, work harder, leverage data, and optimize resource usage.

You can change the behaviors of software-defined batteries by reconfiguring the software instead of removing and reinstalling hardware. For example, you can dial up or down various attributes (e.g., output voltage, charging voltage, yellow flagging thresholds for dying cells) to meet the need of any application without developing a unique, custom solution for each.

—> Software-defined battery systems, like those built on the Tanktwo Battery Operation System (TBOS), allows operators to easily choose their perfect mix from common functionalities and create the most efficient battery pack for their application.

It’s all about the bottom line. Why is 5G such a big deal? Because software-defined radio delivers more capacity for streaming. Enabling TikTok on the go makes a good business case for wireless carriers because that’s where the eyeballs and money are.

—> If the TikTok device in our pockets gets the software-defined treatment, why not a $10k battery pack for military, medical, and industrial applications?

The writing is on the wall: Software-defined battery packs and smart energy management systems are imminent. 

As for the bar fight, the money goes to electronic engineers because managing information allows us the manage resources more effectively. And that’s where the profit lies.