Rajesh Gupta from MOSart Semiconductor speaks with Nidhi Aggrawal and Nikita Kumari from Electronics For You about developing a single-chip Battery Management System architecture, advancing continuous battery health monitoring, and building a semiconductor design roadmap from India.
Q. What does MOSart Semiconductor do?
A. We set up the company in 2025 as a Private Limited entity, incorporated in Bengaluru, with operations based in Hyderabad. It is a fabless semiconductor start-up working on what could be the first single-chip battery management system (BMS) IC. The company focuses on chip design, while manufacturing is handled by external foundries. The goal is to simplify battery electronics by integrating multiple functions into a single chip.
The company is currently pre-revenue. Architecture definition and customer validation are complete, and work is now in the implementation stage—turning the design into a manufacturable chip. This phase is expected to take around 15–18 months before fabrication.
Q. What inspired the name MOSart?
A. We see VLSI and IC design as both engineering and art, requiring creativity and precision. Since MOS transistors are the foundation of modern chips, we combined MOS technology with an artistic design approach to create the name MOSart. The name also carries a subtle reference to Mozart, reflecting harmony and precision.
Q. What is the core innovation in your single-chip Battery Management System IC?
A. Our innovation lies in integrating multiple BMS functions into a single IC, replacing the multi-chip approach used today. We are also introducing a new patent-pending feature called inline Tru-EIS (Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy).
This reduces system complexity, lowers costs, improves accuracy, and shortens development time. Conventional BMS designs rely on multiple ICs mounted on a PCB, with each handling separate sensing, control, and safety functions. The inline Tru-EIS acts as a continuous health monitor for each battery cell, monitoring the rate of electrochemical reactions within the cells.
This continuous monitoring improves battery life and reliability and could become a game-changer for EV and BESS systems.
In the ML1026 architecture, these functions are consolidated into a single chip. The architecture enables all functional blocks to share internal memory, reducing wiring complexity, communication delays, and power consumption while improving system efficiency.
Q. What are the main functional capabilities integrated inside the BMS chip?
A. Through this integration, the chip measures current, voltage, and temperature across multiple battery cells, performs active cell balancing, and includes a Tru-EIS engine for continuous health diagnostics.
The chip also incorporates a lockstep microcontroller for automotive safety, an AI accelerator for advanced battery estimation algorithms, integrated power management, and gate drivers that can safely disconnect the battery during fault conditions.
Q. Can you shed some light on the ‘EIS Engine’?
A. A key highlight of the chip is the integration of Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) directly into the architecture, enabling continuous, real-time battery health monitoring—similar to an ECG.
The system continuously monitors the rate of electrochemical reactions within each cell, enabling accurate measurement rather than predictive modelling of degradation or ageing. This significantly improves battery longevity, reliability, and performance. Traditional battery management systems assess battery health only periodically. Our approach enables continuous 24/7 monitoring of every battery cell using Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy integrated directly into the chip. This provides real-time insight into battery ageing, supports early fault detection, improves safety, and enables more efficient energy usage.
Q. What role does AI play inside a battery management system?
A. Batteries generate large amounts of operational data, and their behaviour changes as they age. AI enables the BMS to adapt dynamically by learning from historical usage patterns. Advanced models can predict ageing behaviour, optimise charging strategies, and improve performance over time. The onboard AI accelerator ensures the chip remains future-ready as battery algorithms continue evolving.
Q. If everything is integrated into one IC, where will this chip physically sit inside the battery system?
A. The chip will still be mounted on a printed circuit board, but the board becomes significantly smaller and simpler. Traditional BMS systems require multiple ICs and complex interconnections, whereas this design consolidates nearly all active electronics into a single chip.
Only essential passive components remain outside, improving compactness, manufacturability, and reliability.
Q. How does a single-chip BMS compare with existing solutions in terms of reliability and competition?
A. Traditional BMS architectures distribute functions across several chips, creating communication overhead and multiple physical failure points. Our single-chip design removes most inter-chip connections, allowing faster data access, higher accuracy, and improved reliability. While established players such as Texas Instruments, NXP Semiconductors, and Qorvo offer advanced BMS solutions, our differentiation lies in integrating all core BMS functions, along with Tru-EIS capability, into a single, tightly integrated IC.
Q. How does your IC minimise power loss and manage energy consumption?
A. Power efficiency comes mainly from integration. Traditional BMS designs consume energy through constant communication among multiple chips, whereas our single-chip architecture eliminates much of this overhead by sharing internal memory. The IC also operates across multiple power states, dynamically adjusting energy consumption based on vehicle conditions to achieve very low standby power while maintaining operational readiness.
Q. Are other global semiconductor companies also working toward a single-chip BMS architecture?
A. Global semiconductor companies are steadily increasing integration levels, with many combining sensing, balancing, or diagnostic functions into single devices. However, most solutions still distribute major BMS functions across multiple chips.
To our knowledge, a fully integrated architecture combining sensing, balancing, EIS, computation, AI acceleration, power management, safety, and diagnostics within a single IC has not yet been commercially realised, which is where our approach aims to differentiate itself.
Q. What communication interfaces does your BMS IC support, and how easily can it integrate into existing vehicle or grid architectures?
A. The IC supports standard industry interfaces, including CAN, Modbus, I²C, and SPI. Our goal was seamless adoption, allowing existing BMS architectures to integrate the chip without requiring redesigns of higher-level vehicle or grid communication systems.
The innovation simplifies hardware while remaining fully compatible with current ecosystems.
Q. How do you validate performance, support different battery chemistries, and technically differentiate your chip from existing solutions?
A. Validation involves extensive testing across voltage ranges, temperatures, and automotive operating conditions using dedicated evaluation hardware. The chip delivers high measurement accuracy for current, voltage, and battery health monitoring while remaining chemistry-agnostic.
A key differentiator is the integrated hardware abstraction layer, which simplifies software development by handling low-level hardware control internally. This enables manufacturers to focus on battery algorithms rather than low-level hardware integration, thereby supporting a more software-defined BMS platform.
Q. What are the key technical challenges you are facing, and how are you addressing them?
A. Designing a single-chip BMS is significantly more complex than building a conventional IC because it combines multiple engineering disciplines—digital design, precision analogue and mixed-signal electronics, high-voltage operation, automotive functional safety, and deep battery system expertise.
Automotive environments demand redundancy and fail-safe operation, meaning the chip must continue functioning safely even if parts of the system fail. Our team’s prior experience across automotive, analogue, digital, and battery IC development allows us to integrate these domains into a unified architecture while maintaining safety and reliability.
Q. Is the innovation being developed entirely in-house, or are there industry and academic collaborations involved?
A. The core system architecture and integration are developed internally, while standard technology blocks such as processor and AI accelerator IP are licensed from established providers such as ARM. On the manufacturing side, we collaborate with semiconductor foundries including GlobalFoundries, United Microelectronics Corporation, and X-Fab Silicon Foundries. We also engage academically with the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar for technical feedback and design reviews.
Q. Are there any future collaborations you are pursuing to accelerate innovation?
A. Yes, collaboration is an important part of our strategy. We are engaging with electric vehicle manufacturers, energy storage companies, and battery makers. While we focus on semiconductor and IC design, industry partners contribute system and application expertise. Working together helps accelerate validation, align the technology with real-world requirements, and develop more efficient battery and energy solutions.
Q. Which market segments are you prioritising—e-mobility, energy storage, or industrial applications?
A. We are focusing on high-energy battery systems above 3kWh, primarily covering electric vehicles and energy storage systems. The chip is being designed to meet automotive safety standards and the most demanding operating environment—making it easier to extend its use to industrial and energy applications later.
Q. How do you expect the market to adopt this technology once it reaches commercialisation?
A. We are already engaging with electric mobility and energy storage companies such as Ather Energy and Adani New Industries Ltd. to validate market requirements.
Semiconductor adoption cycles are naturally long, requiring extensive testing and qualification before deployment. While customers remain cautiously optimistic at this stage, engagement is expected to grow significantly once evaluation samples become available. We anticipate stronger adoption after commercialisation.
Q. As an Indian semiconductor start-up, do you think customers will trust a new domestic player over established global companies?
A. Trust comes from delivering clear value. Customers will not switch vendors for marginal improvements, but they will evaluate solutions that offer a meaningful shift in performance, integration, or cost. A single-chip BMS that replaces multiple ICs while reducing system complexity naturally attracts attention. Cost-sensitive markets such as India and China are especially open to such innovations, and history shows that new players can compete successfully when the technological advantage is strong.
Q. How will this innovation impact electric vehicle costs and battery lifespan?
A. Higher integration can reduce overall electronics costs, which may help lower EV system prices over time. More importantly, continuous and accurate battery monitoring improves safety and significantly extends battery lifespan. By enabling predictive diagnostics, users can avoid premature battery replacement, improving total cost of ownership even if vehicle prices remain similar.
Q. Apart from the BMS IC, are you working on other products or revenue streams?
A. Our primary focus remains the BMS IC. Alongside development, we contribute to VLSI education programmes with institutions such as Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar and Jawaharlal Nehru University. These initiatives help build a talent pipeline and generate modest operational revenue during the early stage.
Q. Are you receiving government support or external funding, and how are you financing development?
A. India’s earlier Design Linked Incentive programme concluded in 2024, and we are awaiting its next phase. Semiconductor development requires substantial upfront investment because revenue comes only after the product reaches manufacturing. In addition to seeking private equity, we have also applied for the RDIF fund through the Technology Development Board (TDB), which serves as the second-level fund manager.
We are also exploring state government-driven incentives for fabless semiconductor companies.
Q. Where do you currently stand in your funding round?
A. We are raising about $4 million (approx. ₹36 crore) to support development through tape-out and early commercialisation. We already have soft commitments from a few investors totalling around $1 million, and we are now looking for a lead investor. Once a lead investor anchors the round with roughly $2–2.5 million, we expect the remaining investors to join and help close the funding round successfully.
Q. With zero revenue today, how do you plan to scale financially once the product launches?
A. Revenue will come from IC sales. Semiconductor products require heavy upfront investment, but once validated and adopted, manufacturing scales rapidly through automated production. After market acceptance, revenue growth can accelerate quickly without proportional increases in operating costs.
Q. What investments and organisational growth plans do you have for the near future?
A. The main priority is expanding the engineering team from a small core group to roughly 50–60 VLSI engineers. Most investment will go towards hiring talent, strengthening design and verification capabilities, and building the simulation and laboratory infrastructure needed for chip development.
Q. What is your long-term product roadmap beyond the single-chip BMS?
A. The ML1026 is the starting point of a broader roadmap. We plan to build a family of battery management ICs and gradually expand into charging system-on-chip solutions, power and energy management devices, and motor controller chips for electric mobility platforms.
The long-term vision is to establish a globally competitive Indian mixed-signal semiconductor company focused on electrification technologies, developed in India for the world.
