The chemistry is the easy part; the trade-off isn't. On January 26, 2021, Samsung was granted US10903666B2, "Battery charging method and apparatus." The CPC stack — H02J 7/0021 and 7/0013 (charge control), H01M 10/44 (charging) and B60L 58/12, 58/21 (EV battery management) — is charge-strategy plumbing.Fast charging and cell longevity pull against each other, and the charging method is where that tension is managed. A method that pushes charge rate up without driving degradation up is, in financial terms, a way to keep a fast-charge promise without inflating the warranty reserve that covers premature capacity loss.The honest read is that a method patent is a lever, not a result. Whether the trade-off actually held in shipping cells lives in field data and warranty experience, not in the grant. An analyst should treat this as a reason to watch degradation-driven warranty trends, not as evidence they improved.For the ledger reader, this is supporting evidence of where a cell supplier is engineering the charge-degradation balance, kept subordinate to the numbers. Any warranty or supply claim rests on the relevant SEC filing on sec.gov, with SEC filings as the index that surfaces it.Read it as a 2021 charge-strategy position from Samsung. The cost question — did faster charging stay inside the reserve — is answered downstream, not by the patent.
“A battery charging method and apparatus are provided. The battery charging method includes determining a number of charging ports to charge a battery based on a determined state of the battery, and charging the battery using the number of charging ports.”— U.S. Patent No. 10,903,666 source