Battery Obsolescence and Your Product

Battery chemistries evolve fast.

What was considered the gold standard five years ago may be eclipsed today by newer chemistries, safer formulations, or higher-density architectures.

This often leaves OEMs facing the same pain point:

“Do we need to redesign everything just to keep up?”

The answer, thankfully, is no.

But it requires a shift in thinking. Instead of choosing a chemistry and hoping it lasts, the goal is to engineer flexibility into the system.

1. Why Obsolescence Happens (And Why It’s Not Your Fault)

Battery suppliers discontinue cells for reasons like:

• market demand shifting to new formats
  
  
• materials availability changing
  
  
• regulations tightening
  
  
• manufacturing lines upgrading
  
  
• unsafe or outdated chemistries being phased out
  
  

It happens across the industry, and it’s predictable.
That means you can plan for it.

2. Choosing the “Right Chemistry”

This is where developers often get stuck:
“Which chemistry will be around the longest?”

There is no universal winner, only the chemistry that best fits your use case.

For example:

• Li-ion NMC → great for high energy density
  
  
• LiFePO4 → exceptional safety and cycle life
  
  
• Lithium Primary → ideal for ultra-low-power IoT, remote devices
  
  
• Lithium Polymer → flexible form factors for tight spaces
  
  
• NiMH → robust for certain medical/industrial environments
  
  

The key is selecting what your application requires: 

power, runtime, thermal behavior, longevity, safety classification, and environmental constraints.

We’re helping teams map out these needs and match them with stable, proven battery chemistries.

3. Designing with Chemistry Flexibility in Mind

This is where future-proofing becomes real. A strong battery design:

• supports multiple compatible cells
  
  
• uses scalable BMS architecture
  
  
• allows mechanical variations without redesign
  
  
• anticipates updated certification requirements
  
  
• ensures firmware/BMS updates can be deployed
  
  
• plans for end-of-life or recyclability
  
  

When we design a pack, we purposely include a second-source path:
If one manufacturer phases out a cell, you already have an approved alternative. 

That single step can save thousands of dollars and months of engineering time.

4. Certification Awareness: The Hidden Obsolescence Trigger

Regulations evolve, and keeping up with UL, IEC, UN 38.3, and regional requirements is essential.
If your battery pack wasn’t designed with flexibility to meet upcoming revisions, you may end up forced into a redesign.

Lifecycle planning accounts for:

• expected changes in certification cycles
  
  
• geographic expansion (EU vs. U.S. vs. Asia requirements)
  
  
• scaling from prototype to mass production
  
  

This is especially critical for medical, industrial, and IoT devices.

5. End-of-Life: The Part Nobody Wants to Think About (But Should)

Recycling and second-life use cases are becoming major design factors. A future-proof battery pack should:

• be disassembled without destroying core components
  
  
• utilize recyclable materials
  
  
• provide data logs for assessing health at the end-of-life
  
  

Circularity is purely risk management in action.

Future-proofing is about designing resilience into your system from day one. 

When done right, your battery pack can adapt to the next chemistry shift, the next certification update, and the next performance demand without a complete redesign. And that’s exactly what we help our partners achieve every day.