Texas Instruments took home top honors in Power & Sustainability at the Best of Sensors Awards, held May 6 at Sensors Converge 2026. The award recognized TI’s BQ41Z90, a highly integrated, single-chip battery fuel gauge, monitor, and protector engineered for 3- to 16-series lithium-ion battery packs. By rewriting the math behind energy tracking, the chip tackles a massive environmental and engineering bottleneck: battery uncertainty.
The Core Technical Challenge: Unpredictable Loads
Traditional battery fuel gauges struggle when paired with portable electronics operating under highly dynamic, unpredictable loads. When power demand spikes erratically, state-of-charge (SoC) calculations lose precision.
To prevent systems from unexpectedly shutting down, engineers have historically been forced to oversize battery packs—adding bulk and cost just to build in an safety margin for calculation errors. This over-engineering results in heavier portable equipment, shorter overall operational lifespans, and a larger environmental footprint because of the mining and processing of unneeded battery materials.
How It Works: Industry-First Predictive Tracking
The BQ41Z90 solves this problem by swapping standard predictive guesswork for an industry-first architecture called Dynamic Z-Track™ technology.
Rather than taking intermittent snapshots of voltage, the chip relies on its flash-programmable CPU to run continuous predictive modeling of battery impedance in real time.
Precision Tracking: The BQ41Z90 delivers an incredibly tight 1% state-of-charge accuracy under volatile workloads.
Extended Run Time: By knowing exactly how much energy remains at any given millisecond, systems can safely drain the battery closer to its true physical limit, extending equipment runtime by up to 30%.
Space Efficiency: The single-chip architecture integrates comprehensive safety protection and elliptical curve cryptography (ECC) authentication, slashing necessary board space by up to 25% compared to discrete multi-chip alternatives.
Market Impact and Sustainability Applications
By combining high accuracy with structural protection, TI enables smaller, longer-lasting power configurations across a wide variety of industries:
Transportation & Mobility: Extending the dependable range of e-bikes, e-scooters, and light electric vehicles (EVs).
Industrial & Robotics: Ensuring tool and warehouse robotics operate with highly accurate runtime predictions, minimizing charging downtime.
Aerospace & Drones: Optimizing flight times while ensuring critical fail-safe battery monitoring.
Medical & Healthcare: Delivering highly reliable battery status metrics for critical life-monitoring hardware.
By extracting significantly more work out of identical lithium-ion chemistries (including Li-Ion, LiFePO4, NiMH, and Li-Polymer), the BQ41Z90 changes the sustainability equation. It proves the greenest battery design isn't necessarily a larger one—it's a smarter one.
Other winners of the Best of Sensors 2026 are available online.